(An article by Clive Knowles of Goldhosts December 2013)
Followong on from The Love Principal.
So you can pay £10,000 per month for hosting... Or you can get it for free. So why do people pay for hosting when it is available for free?
Is there any such thing as a free lunch? Free Hosting also comes with it's own catches. They maybe in the form of Advertising added to your website, so the operator can re-coup costs by selling advertising space. It may be that there are extra charges when you would like additional services like mySQL databases or email addresses.
Before thinnking about using a free hosting service, think about the things the provider has very little money to spend on:
Computer hardware;
Internet Connection Reliability and Speed;
Support.
There is also the question about the number of sites the server is trying to serve. It can be many thousands. This can cause both speed and other problems explained below.
The first difference people (and more importantly search engines) will notice is speed. On a congested server, with thousands of websites to serve simaltaineously, it may take a few seconds for the server to find, load and then sent the files required to serve a page.
On a good quality server, the number of sites is kept to a minimum to ensure there is no congestion. A quality server will also have enough memory and fast hard disk space to provide the files in fractions of a second.
There are extreme cases were fractions of a second matter. The best known of these is in stock market trades. While we do not claim to have servers this fast, we do have servers which can provide a response to users in Kent and the South East within 1/50th of a second.
Having servers located this close is much better than using servers in the continetal US. We do have a US based server, but this is not useful for serving website to the UK, as response times are nearly always over 1/10th of a second.
Easy, a website ower who loves his website will certainly not use a free provider. They will want to ensure the server is alway online, has plenty of bandwidth, and is fast enough to provide super-quick load times for pages.
As with the rest of the Love Principle, search engines measure these load times, and use this information to help rank the website. Faster websites rank higher.
If you think your website hosting is too slow, please call Goldhosts on 01233 666263 or contact us.
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