Free Subdomain Hosting
Posted by freewebspace1 on June 23, 2008
There are a few different types of free web hosting, but on this post we focus on 2 types.
Free Domain Hosts and Free Subdomain Hosts.
Some companies like StormPages allow both – you can host a domain or you can use one of their subdomains. This is the safest type of free hosting company. That way when you are ready for a domain you can add it easily.
Others do only one or the other. What is the difference?
1. Free Domain Hosting – you own the domain and you point your nameservers to the host. Then you access it via the internet by typing in your domain name in the explorer address bar. Such as google.com.
2. Free Subdomain Hosting – you don’t own a domain and you don’t have to pay for a subdomain. A subdomain hosting name is pointed to a subfolder on the server below the main domain. Accessed as bob.20m.com or the like. This is a more cost effective option, but you have less control. What if the host goes out of business? All the links you have built up don’t point to a working domain. Where if you were using a full domain hosting company – if they go out of business – your links don’t break because you can move the site to a new server.
Even companies that just offer the subdomain hosting can offer an add-free option so you can remove ads for a few bucks. I think stormpages is about $19 and 20m is something like $24. Then it costs nothing to add a domain so you can have a full hosting plan for about $20. That’s compared to the normal $100/year that most people charge. Of course, you don’t get all the features this way, but it’s a great way to start a website for very little money and get away from the spam ads they love to put on your pages (which could potentially drive customers away from your site).
For things like a shopping cart or any ecommerce function you’ll probably need a full hosting plan at one of the providers like hostmonster, bluehost, or godaddy. We’ve listed them in our top cheap hosting links to the right. Some of these will offer a free domain name with the purchase of a hosting plan. The only problem when shopping for a hosting plan like this is paying attention to price. Everyone advertises their 2 year pre-payment price so the total charge is something like $165 instead of the 6.95 they advertise. Godaddy offers a 2 month payment option so it’s low risk to start, but they don’t offer a free domain (this costs an extra $8).
If you are using subdomain hosting – you can always do a 301 redirect to your new site after you get enough traffic to justify the investment in a domain and full hosting plan. This will tell the search engines to point all links and give link credit to your new site so you get backlinks right from the start. Of course, if the host deletes you pages or goes out of business you will lose that. Just make sure you choose a solid free domain hosting company. Beware of those based on panels like vistapanel, xpanel, or layeredpanel. These are just too easy to setup and those are beginner scripts so a host that uses them probably won’t be around long.
Hope this helps. Good luck in your free subdomain or domain hosting venture!
