Many of the free hosting services seem to be a good deal, but actually they are not. For e-commerce or any other type of business websites, free hosting cannot be suitable owing to many drawbacks which are discussed in the article.

For blogs and simple personal websites, free hosting can be a good choice, but for business or e-commerce websites we cannot choose free web hosting plans. Free web hosting has many issues which limits the money making capacities of our website. The first drawback with free web hosting providers is that they place their name along with url which makes it very lengthy and hard to read. This will not create confidence among prospective buyers. Free web hosts put lot of banners and advertisements on your website without your permission. This is to generate money for their own business. So, users who get irritated by these unnecessary advertisements will not come and visit your website at any point. The bandwidth and space provided by the free web hosting providers are very small. If our website gets many visitors online, then we shall not be able to handle the traffic owing to very low bandwidth.

Free hosts will not allow us to host advertisements or add features like shopping carts and plug-ins to accept credit card payments to our website. So, we cannot host a business web site or e-commerce website with free hosting providers. The web server is not very secure and we cannot get SSL certificates for handling transactions in a secure way.

The web servers are not powerful and they do not use advanced technologies which makes our website to get downloaded very slowly. They do not support scripting languages such as PERL, CGI, Javascript, Ruby and other latest technologies and we cannot use them in our website. The technical support provided by free web hosts are very poor they respond very slowly. We can use the online web site builder to create our website. But we cannot change the layouts and customize our website as we like. We cannot run cron jobs or important scripts in our website with free hosting services.

Since, there are many drawbacks with free web hosting as listed above, it is better to spend some money and buy a shared web hosting space for hosting an e-commerce or business website.