Recommended by David

You probably already know that a hosting account is necessary to hold all your website information.

In theory, there is nothing to stop you hosting your website from your own computer as long as it is connected to the internet. In practice, though, you probably wouldn’t want your computer permanently switched on, or tied up serving your website visitors, when you wanted to use it for some other purpose - although there would be no monetary cost, the price you would pay in other ways would be too high.

You may be tempted to use a company offering “free” web hosting - DON’T. As with using your own computer, the price you would pay would be too high.

Let me explain. Search engines judge the popularity of a website partly by the links coming to it from other sites. When free web hosting first appeared, the spammers out there had a field day; they set up numerous one page websites solely to contain links to their real websites. When the search engines became aware of what was happening, they simply stopped recognising any web page that was hosted on a server that offered free hosting.

So if you have a free web hosting account, don’t expect any traffic to come your way via a search engine.

If you have a free web hosting account, it’s not even worth considering upgrading your free hosting account to a paid account with the same provider. Although you may be provided with better resources (more disk space etc.), it may not be moved to another location - so it will still not be indexed by the search engines. So, still no free traffic!

In conclusion, if you’re serious about setting up a web business, you have to accept that you will have to pay for web hosting. But it’s not as expensive as you may think.

More on that in my next post.