Dirt cheap and free webhosting services - are they worth it?

The Tech Zone continues their articles on web hosting with a look at the free web hosting business.

The main thing wrong today with trying to find a webhost for most individuals and businesses is the shear number of them. Their prices range from free to hundreds of dollars per month. When you go out on the web today and do a search for hosting you will find page upon page of hosts. Some are well established companies with solid reputations and business plans that make sense. Yet some are beyond belief that anyone would host with a company that offers you a 100mb website for $.99. Yes I said that right $.99. You can find the article at The Tech Zone

Pretty neat article. Some hosting accounts are just too cheap. Take the $0.99 example for instance. You always get what you paid for so don't expect superb quality from those services. Just imagine you'd need to handle support e-mails, new users, make sure everyone pays on time, ... for about hundred users which only give you a few dollars of profit. That's unbearable.

Although I must comment that a few years ago when I just started DV Hardware I met a very very friendly free hosting which was (and still is) run be some really dedicated guys. But they don't accept everyone. They screen new users and they only accept the ones who plan to make good use of their account. I applied to run DV Hardware on their server years ago and I got accepted.

It was really a dream. I got access to all kinds of features that most free hosting providers don't provide. This includes things like PHP and MySQL and they also offered a very fast server without any advertising. The only drawback was the low amount of diskspace (I guess about 100MB) and only a few GB of bandwidth a month.

Those guys cover the costs by providing premium accounts for a small fee. I really liked it but as DV Hardware became bigger it was time to search a new, paid hosting provider.

I hope my experience proves that not all free webhosting services are bad. A small number of them really offers a dedicated high-quality service but they are hard to find. And if you find them, please don't abuse them but thank them for the great service they provide.