These days, getting a free website is easy. Whether you want to start a small online business or just want to share your opinions with the rest of the world, you can get a website of your own with just a few clicks of the mouse. Before starting, however, ask yourself, what do you plan do to with the site?

If you just plan to share stuff with others online, you should probably go with a blog. A blog allows you to post articles, pictures, videos as well as links to other web sites, and it requires little technical knowledge. Visitors are also allowed to write and upload comments about what you’ve posted, and you can manage them, editing certain comments and deleting others you find inappropriate.

If you would like to establish a reputation for expertise on a particular subject so you can build a career as a freelance consultant, a blog is the ideal solution. You can set up a blog in just a few minutes by using a hosted blog service. You can easily design your blog using the site’s pre-designed templates and write and post entries using its text editors. An alternative is to use free articles for your website from content generating sources other than yourself.

If you would like to restrict access to your blog to family and friends, you can create your blog using an online diary service or a tumblelog. These blogs are essentially online journals or scrapbooks where you can post photos, videos, text entries and links to other sites. You can also use your online diary to social network in online communities.

If you’re creating a site for an online business, however, you will need to use a free web hosting service to create your site. A web site set up on a free web host allows you to include e-commerce features such as multiple e-mail accounts, a shopping cart and online payment solutions.

However, there are many downsides to using a free web host. For one, many hosts will put their own advertising on your site as a way of defraying their hosting costs. Your URL will look something like this mybusinessname.webhost.com, which many clients might interpret as unprofessional. And the amount of bandwidth you are allocated is limited, which means that if you start to get a lot of visitors, many of them may not be able to access your site once you have exceeded your allocation. If these limitations don’t bother you, go ahead and set up your site on a free web host. Once your online venture starts to become a success, you can easily upgrade to a paid web host provider.

If you’re interested in using a free web host to set up your site, here are some things to look out for when picking the host to use.

One, what is the amount of web space the host will give you? If you intend to put a lot of pictures, video clips and sound files, the allocation may not be enough for your needs. You should also consider if the web space allocation will give your site room to grow in the future.

Second, once you’ve gained some technical expertise and want to upload web pages that you’ve designed yourself to your site, does the web host allow FTP access?

Third, what are the limitations of the host with regard to maximum file size and types of files that you can upload?

Fourth, how fast or reliable is the web host? If your site frequently down or has slow access, then you will lose visitors and business since they will look for another site.

Five, is the bandwidth allocated to you by the free web host enough for your need? For a starter e-commerce site, an allocation of 1 to 3 GB should be sufficient.

There’s little difficulty in getting a free website; the challenge lies in creating and maintaining an interesting one that will make people want to visit it over and over again.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 12:45 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.