I had to go get some more info to validate what is being said here. People have brought up about Freewebs.com so I will use them for my example.

http://members5.freewebs.com/page.jsp?page=termsOfUse

Terms of Use

A Violation of any of the below Terms of Service will result in the termination of your account, with or without warning.

Freewebs is a private service which provides free web hosting. We offer our free members up to 40MB of web space, and many site building, editing, and promotion tools. Freewebs reserves the right to cancel any account for any reason or no reason at all. Freewebs provides web hosting to any site that abides to our terms and conditions. Freewebs reserves the right to change the terms and conditions at any time. Freewebs users are entirely liable for all activities conducted through your account.

The following rules apply while using Freewebs services:

1. Pornographic, obscene, nude, graphically violent, and other inappropriate content is strictly prohibited.
2. Offensive and indecent directory names are not allowed and will be blocked.
3. Freewebs is not responsible for the content of any member homepages. We reserve the right to remove any homepages that are in violation of our terms and conditions. Members will be held legally responsible for the contents of their web pages for, but not limited to use of copyrighted material without the permission of the author or posting material considered indecent for minors. The use of Freewebs Homepages for illegal purposes is strictly forbidden and the homepage will be removed without notice.
4. Freewebs membership will be revoked if any of the following activities occur:
   1. Adult or Pornographic related
   2. Hate, Bigotry, and/or Intolerance
   3. Warez or Software Piracy related
   4. Music Piracy Related
   5. Hacking Related
   6. Making available copyrighted software which has been "cracked" (e.g., copyright protection for the software has been removed)
   7. Making available serial numbers for software which can be used to illegally validate or register software.
   8. Making available tools which can be used for no purpose other than "cracking" software.
   9. Spamming to promote your website
   10. Anything related to illegal activity
5. We do not allow any type of programs, software, or MP3 files on our server unless you are the full owner and have all rights to the file. This includes files with the following extensions: our server .rar, .arj, .tar, .mp3 or .exe. Copyrighted files will be deleted without notice!
6. You and any person who has access to your account must evaluate, and bear the risk associated with, the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of any Content. Freewebs reserves the right to remove Content which is deemed in Freewebs sole discretion harmful, offensive, or otherwise in violation of the Rules or any rules or policies Freewebs has in place at the time.
7. You or Freewebs may terminate your Account at any time for any reason. To remove your Freewebs site and account, login and visit your My Account section.
8. Freewebs will not be liable for any of its services. We have the right to cancel our service at any time, and we will not be liable for any files that are lost and/or corrupted which may occur from a system crash or hard disk failure. To the full extent permissible under the applicable law, Freewebs shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages resulting from the use or inability to use Freewebs services.
9. All non-premium users are required to have the Freewebs FreeBar Code on their website. This adds a small strip at the top of your website with additional features for your site like bookmarking, tell-a-friend, and search. There will also be a small text link at the bottom of your site linking back to Freewebs.com. Users can upgrade their user status to premium status for less than a dollar a month. Other restrictions apply to all non-premium accounts including a maximum limit of 50 files per account, and unavailability of several site addons and extras. In addition, sites older than 7 days that have not signed up for any premium services or registered a domain name will automatically have banner advertisements inserted at the top of the site. Users may get rid of the banner ads and the FreeBar at any time by upgrading their account to premium status at any time by signing up for any of our paid services starting at less than $1 per month.
   Users agree not to contact any advertisers run on Freewebs or Freewebs sites. If you have questions or problems regarding advertisements, please contact our support or abuse departments.
10. All templates offered by Freewebs are copyrighted material. Such templates are offered for use to Freewebs users under license only, and are not offered for sale or unbridled use. Such license limits use of Freewebs templates to sites hosted by Freewebs.com. Freewebs templates may not be transferred to or hosted on another web host or Internet Service Provider.

Ok, I see alot of restrictions even if you do upgrade. Can't take templates with you if you ever do decide to move to another host. So you'll end up redesigning your site.

What's this? Freewebs will not be liable for any of its services. Whoa!

Freewebs may terminate your Account at any time for any reason. Enough said.

Now if you are only needing a few pages maybe this will do for you, but, what if you wanted to open a forum for your business? What if you wanted to offer photo storage? What if you want to offer your clients a 'virtual classroom' for training? What if you want to install IM chat on your site? A CMS script? Support Services Manager? Project Management? Some of this stuff you may never have heard of.

Now, what if your host included with your account (as additional software):

 Navigation 
   Fantastico Home 
   Control Panel Home 
     
    Blogs
     b2evolution 
     Nucleus 
     pMachine Free 
     WordPress 
     
    Content Management (CMS)
     Drupal 
     Geeklog 
     Joomla 
     Mambo Open Source 
     PHP-Nuke 
     phpWCMS 
     phpWebSite 
     Post-Nuke 
     Siteframe 
     TYPO3 
     Xoops 
     
    Customer Relationship
     Crafty Syntax Live Help 
     Help Center Live 
     osTicket 
     PerlDesk 
     PHP Support Tickets 
     Support Logic Helpdesk 
     Support Services Manager 
     
    Discussion Boards
     phpBB2 
     SMF 
     
    E-Commerce
     CubeCart 
     OS Commerce 
     Zen Cart 
     
    F.A.Q.
     FAQMasterFlex 
     
    Guestbooks
     ViPER Guestbook 
     
    Hosting Billing
     AccountLab Plus 
     phpCOIN 
     
    Image Galleries
     4Images Gallery 
     Coppermine Photo Gallery 
     Gallery 
     
    Mailing Lists
     PHPlist 
     
    Polls and Surveys
     Advanced Poll 
     phpESP 
     PHPSurveyor 
     
    Project Management
     dotProject 
     PHProjekt 
     
    Site Builders
     Soholaunch Pro Edition 
     Templates Express 
     
    Wiki
     TikiWiki 
     PhpWiki 
     
    Other Scripts
     Dew-NewPHPLinks 
     Moodle 
     Noahs Classifieds 
     Open-Realty 
     phpAdsNew 
     PHPauction 
     phpFormGenerator 
     WebCalendar 
     
    Extras
   Language
   Side menu appearance
   Email notifications
   Installations overview

...and as the core of your hosting it includes:

	Hosting package	Executive
	Subdomains	5 /unlimited
	Parked Domains	0 / 10
	Addon Domains	1 / 10
	Mysql databases	4 / unlimited
	Disk usage	186.60 /2500.00MB
	SQL Disk usage	1.21 MB
	Disk space available	2313.40 MB
	Bandwidth usage	158.61 / 20480 MB
	Email accounts:	19 / unlimited
	Email forwarders:	2 / unlimited
	Autoresponders:	1 / unlimited
	Email filters	0 / unlimited
	Mailing lists:	2 / unlimited
	FTP accounts	2 / unlimited

 

And being able to run cron jobs, programs based on PERL, php, and many others. Total freedom. Total control. Sounds expensive? Well, it's not. Somewhere between (rounded figures) $5.00 to $15.00 a month or opt to save more by paying annually.

These are the facts. You cannot do on a free web service, even if you upgrade, what you can do on a regular host account. I know. I've been there.

 

Kenneth R Sword Jr

Since it's Friday I thought I might use a fictitious and funny story to illustrate my thinking.  Ready?  Here goes...

Say someone gives you a car to use.  An old one they no longer need because they're buying a new one.  While you can afford a new one of your own you decide that a free car is more cost effective than making monthly payments.  The money you save will allow you to put a down payment on that nice little 2 door convertible you had your eye on.  After all, you're single right? 

Now, the only conditions are that if you move away you cannot take the car with you, the Family Name they painted on the rear deck lid cannot be removed, and they can at any time ask for the car back for whatever reason. 

Is it still worth the deal?  Sure.  Why not? 

Let's say you've got a date with someone.  You go pick them up in your "extended loan" vehicle.  He/She looks at your car uncomfortably...specifically the deck lid with the name "Wu Family" written clearly on the back in large red spray paint.  You're obviously not Chinese.  She smiles and pretends not to notice but it's obvious she's embarassed for you and her. 

Part way through dinner, your friend calls.  His car is in the shop and he needs to take back his car for a few days.  He asks where you are as he's coming to pick up the vehicle.  (He has his own set of keys to YOUR free car).  You explain to your guest the situation with the free car and she informs you she already pretty much knew this was the case by the look  of the car.  You offer to pay her cab fare home but at this point she just needs to get away from you and your free car.  She slaps 20 bucks down on the table,  stands up, tells you she had a nice time and that she'll call you, (Yeah Right) then she turns on a dime and leaves quickly.

Depressed, you go home alone and go straight to bed. 

In the morning, that job in Florida you were hoping you'd get comes through and they call to inform you that you're the selected candidate and ask how long before you can relocate.  AWESOME!  Oh crap, you can't take your car.  You have to buy a new one anyway!

So, you've gone full circle because you now have to buy a vehicle ANYWAY so you really haven't saved any money.  That hot date (your potential customer) couldn't get away from you FAST enough because of your "FREE" car.  Really, what's the point? 

Imagine how this scenario might have changed if you had your own new vehicle. 

Buy yourself a nice shiney new vehicle you can be proud of with a warranty and avoid the hassles. 

The moral of the story boys and girls is: Free isn't ALWAYS free. 

Have a great weekend folks. 

Michael and Ken, you have both made excellent points.

Free is never free, it is actually more of a hostage situation, and cheap is cheap, no matter how you slice it. Your visitors won't think of you as thrifty, just cheap.

If you're not serious enough about your business to invest a nominal amount on domain registration and hosting, how serious can you be about anything else? Why should I spend my money with your business when you won't spend any money on your business?

My two cents...

Trina

Hello Kenneth,

Couldnt agree more! Thanks for your informative post,I shall pass this on!

Thanks

Leanne Busby

http://www.aussie-money-tree.biz 

http://www.aussie-money-tree.info

 

It's great if you're making sales using free hosting but if you aren't making enough to pay for paid hosting (around $5 a month), don't you think you could be doing better?

Speaking as someone who has built over 170 sites, of all the  hosting control panels I've used, Cpanel is the easiest. It comes with a manual, unlike other control panels. Plus I've noticed hosting with the largest companies (godaddy) doesn't always give you an easy to understand control panel. I think Cpanel is pretty straight forward. 

Once you've used Cpanel, if you have to switch hosts, if you use another Cpanel host, you won't have to learn a different type of control panel. Plus Cpanel is the most full-featured if they include Fantastico (not all do). It allows you to create a blog, forum, chatroom, etc. by clicking a few buttons.

One big thing missing from free hosting is limited or no stats. You have no idea how many have visited your site and/or where they've come from. This is very important when it comes to increasing your sales or even knowing why you're not getting any.