It’s understandable when people prefer very cheap web hosting to paid ones, despite all the advantages that an honest-to-goodness paid hosting plan provides. After all, not everybody wants to make a living off running a website, and in some cases very cheap web hosting providers actually make things simpler, allowing webmasters to focus on running a website instead of being mired in the backend side of things. However, very cheap web hosting usually comes with a few “catches” and you need to do a few things in order to make a most out of them, such as:

Conserve Bandwidth

Bandwidth costs money, and when you’re on a cheap or free host, you won’t have much bandwidth to go around with. This means you need to make the most out of it if you don’t want to greet your regular visitors with 404 errors or page is suspended prompts.

There are a lot of ways you can save on bandwidth, such as by being mindful of the images you use. Unless you really need the transparencies provided by PNG files, you’ll get much smaller file sizes without sacrificing quality by using JPG files. Images are easily the main culprits when it comes to unnecessarily wasting bandwidth on a site, as most people just upload and post pictures willy-nilly. This is fine if you’re on a paid host with unlimited resources, but on cheap hosting, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Conserve Storage Space

Bandwidth and storage are two sides of the same coin, in the sense that they both cost money and are both available in limited quantities when using a free host. Again, multimedia files should be watched, avoid posting them if possible and try to optimize them before uploading. Don’t upload applications or software even if they are not pirated. If you’re going to host useful files, then you might as well invest in paid hosting, since you’re bound to attract a lot of downloaders and may find a way to monetize the site. If you prefer going with a free or cheap web host indefinitely, find some other ways to host the files.

Take Advantage of Third Party Services

This ties in with conserving bandwidth and storage space. You can easily get around the limitations of free hosting by using third party sites that allow you to host multimedia content and link it back to your site. For example, you can upload videos on Youtube and embed the videos on your site, that way you can offer video content without using up your host’s bandwidth and space (since they’re using Youtube’s everytime they watch the video). For images, you can use any of the various photo hosting sites out there like flickr or photobucket.

Invest in a Domain Name

This will save you a lot of headache later. It will cost a little bit of money, but not much as domain names are getting cheap again. If you have a domain name, you can point it to your free host and you’ll have much more control over your site’s future. Whether you simply decide to move to a different free host or finally invest in paid hosting, visitors will still be able to access your site through the same domain name, and you won’t lose any regular visitors.

Tags: web hosting tips

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 16th, 2013 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.