Free Hosting – What's It All About

Most people who want to make their presence on the web or communicate via the web look for free web hosting sites for their personal or for their business use. People are uncomfortable about giving out their financial information on the internet. As long as no money is involved they are ready to try free hosting. Also they only want to make their presence known on the web and are not looking to conduct any business via the web. This is what most people think till they realize the power of the internet. For a personal or small size business a free host is an easy way to step into the internet world without spending any money.

There are any numbers of sites that you find on the internet that eagerly offer free web hosting. In fact a simple search on any internet browser for free hosting literally returns millions of sites that offer free hosting. It makes one wonder how these free web hosting providers make a living by offering free website hosting. After all we all know there is no such thing as a free lunch, but there is someone paying for the lunch and its not you. There are several ways in which free hosting service providers make money. One is they run banners, ads, popup and script links on your web page. The second way is, if they offer free website hosting they offer links to their webmaster in the control link, use your site to send email ads, or require forum posting. Forums have ads, plus you unknowingly create free web site content for them. The third option, that free web hosting service providers' use is that they will limit the space they give you, plus the bandwidth is limited and scripting is not allowed. Most free web site hosting providers offer a sub domain or sub directory that is routed through their own main domain. They do not allow users to host their own top level domain name free. Free web hosting service providers hope that they will coax you to upgrade to a paid hosting service. The downside of free web hosting service providers is that they use unreliable servers. So there is no guarantee that your web site will always be available on the internet. However over the years there are some free website hosting providers that have become quite reliable.

Web services are continuously expanding and growing and web users are making more demands on web service providers. Displaying pictures, videos and graphics on sites has become a common phenomenon. A person may visit a new place, like Rome, take pictures, make videos and then want to display them for free on the internet. Recognizing this need there is free email hosting service providers, who also provide free video hosting and free image hosting services. Why do we have free email service providers? The internet is the one medium that gives you access to people across the globe. The world market dynamics have changed completely since the internet became a part of our lives. Business houses and large and small organizations have been quick at recognizing this potential. Free email service providers make their living by providing email addresses to organizations, governments, election candidates, etc who want to promote their products or themselves via the internet. That’s why anyone who uses free email service knows very well that advertising mails do land in their mailboxes.

The internet has become more than just an email service or a place to advertise your company. Images, photographs, videos and files are exchanged using internet service. There are free file hosting services that are extensively used by developers to exchange code files. Using a bulletin board has been practiced from a long time on the internet. Organizations had their own bulletin boards on which questions were asked and answered by a closed group of users. But now people want to chat, ask and answer questions and there are free forum hosting services available. You may need to register to use a forum hosting site. Depending on the interests of an individual, he or she can become a member of a forum. When members register on a forum site they are asked to provide their email address. What the free forum hosting site gets is a directory of email addresses.

PHP is a very popular tool used for developing and maintaining dynamic web pages. PHP developers exchange code through the internet. There are again free PHP hosting services that allow developers to place code on that others can use. As PHP is free software and is continuously being upgraded.

Another term that has become quite common on the internet is blog. A blog is basically a community of users that exchange ideas on a particular subject. It's like a chronicle of events that are listed; it could be related to politics, travel, fashion, etc. creation of blogs and maintaining blogs is again provided as a free blog hosting service. There are plenty of free blog hosting service providers on the internet. You can also find free domain hosting service providers who allow you to create your own domain using their services. The free domain hosting may have certain limitations, like space, bandwidth, number of free email addresses. They again hope that your domain will generate enough traffic that you will be persuaded to pay for an upgraded service.

All these internet free service providers have to earn their bread and butter from somewhere and they manage to do that in several ways. The more people that use their free services, the bigger grow their database of personal email addresses. The more hosts they maintain, the more places they have to run ads for organizations. Free service providers make their money by selling email addresses and running ads.

You can switch a TV channel during a commercial, but you will read an ad when it pops up in your chat, or there is an email that grabs your attention. Its very difficult to name the best free hosting site or the top free hosting site. As everyday there are new service providers coming online and the internet market is a very competitive market. The internet has been responsible for transforming the world into a global village and even the top internet service providers are continuously trying to topple each other.