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Student Web Hosting Guide
Major universities usually provide free student web hosting for individuals enrolled in their institutions. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this, as it’s free. But students will eventually find out that the hosting is so limited that there’s really nothing useful to do with it.
Limitations for Student Hosting
Limited Bandwidth
For starters, it’s usually hosted on school servers alongside other students’ sites, so bandwidth is definitely not in abundance.
Limited Content
Additionally, the universities have very strict policies on what you can put in them, so you can’t have full control over your content. If you want true free student web hosting, you have to strike out on your own and build your site using third party services.
Disadvantages
Losing Your Contents
Once you graduate, your free account goes away. Your content goes away. Yes, you may always save it in the cloud but that would mean uploading everything again.
Losing Your Audience
Once your site goes down, the audience you have gained all those years of maintaining your site will be lost too. You can always build a new site but that would mean working to get an audience again.
Possible Solutions
Free Hosting
You can get free hosting for 6 months. No credit card required. Click here to get it.
The biggest mitigating factor is that students don’t really have much in the way of a budget when it comes to hosting. You have to rely on free hosts that provide free storage and bandwidth to users. Even if you do have a little bit of money to spend on your website, you have to devote that to buying a domain name and keeping it up – it will save you some headache down the line.
Thankfully, most free services like Blogger and Weebly allow you to use your own domain name instead of their free subdomains. Sometimes the free hosts let you buy the domain from them, but you should avoid it and buy from somewhere instead, because you don’t want everything to be tied down to a single company.
Get an Ad Account
Next comes the issue of advertisements. Free hosts usually subsidize the free service by running ads on your site. This is something that you will have to live with, as there’s no getting away from it. You either pay for hosting or get ads on your site. Your best bet is to is to open a Google Adsense account and get the money from ads yourself.
Free Templates
Layout is another thing. Most free hosts don’t let you build your own layout from scratch, since many of them don’t allow CSS or php, or anything other than html. Thankfully, these sites tend to have free templates that you can modify and customize to your heart’s content. In some cases, you can actually do whatever you want with the templates when it comes to appearance, with the only true restrictions being that you can’t run scripts or activex content (for security purposes.)
However, you may also find hosting sites that offer free templates.
Spread your Sites
Lastly, you don’t have to keep everything in a single host or service. In fact, it would be better for you in the long run if you keep your content spread out across different services, The advantage of this is that one company going down or one account being suspended won’t take your entire website down. Rebuilding will be easy.
If you follow all of the above things, you will find that you can have a fully functioning website even if you’re just a student. As a matter of fact, hosting your site outside of the university is even better because you’ll still have access to it once you graduate.
Tags: hosting tips
