How to Compare Free Web Hosting

For people searching for free web hosting, it's important to have solid criteria to base a comparison on in order to choose the plan that will be best for you. This article guides you in choosing criteria so you'll know how to compare web host providers with free plans.

Establishing Categories

Free web hosting can be categorized in a number of different ways. If you plan carefully so that you know what categories you need, you'll more easily be able to compare the free hosting options that are available and make a choice that will work well for you. Here are questions to ask yourself in order to establish what you need:

• Can I live with advertising on my site in exchange for web space at no cost or not?

• Do I require particular programming languages to create the website I want? For example:

• If you need to use .ASP, you'll want to look for Windows hosting exclusively.
• If you need a LAMP configuration (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, PHP, or Python), you'll need Linux.
• If you need to use server-side scripting, you need a hosting program that allows this.

• Do I require the ability to work with certain software to create the website I want? (For example, some software is server OS specific.)

• Can I work in an environment with certain, defined parameters? For example:

• Could you create your website using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?
• Can you live with a 1 MySQL database limit?

• Do I need to provide streaming multimedia?

• Do I require statistics and logs to analyze my web traffic?

• Can I live with a sub-domain, or do I need to be able to use my own URL?

• Do I need to be able to use sub-domains within my own URL, and if so, how many?

• Will a disk space in the 10's of Megabytes be sufficient or do I need Gigabytes?

• Will a bandwidth limit of single-digit GB work for me?

• Will a file-size upload limit of 200 kb impede my website building?

• Do I need to be able to post my own advertisements?

• Do I need a number of email accounts greater than 1? Do I need SMTP?

Looking for Hosting

Once you've established your needs, you can start searching. Note that no cost hosting is often advertised with these types of titles:

• Free .ASP  Hosting

• Free PHP  Hosting

• Free Unlimited Hosting

• Free Domain Hosting

• Free Image Hosting

• Free Web Host No Ads

The "no ads" hosting may be more specific, and refer to "no forced ads"  or "no banner ads."