Personal Web Sites and Internet Servers

When selecting an internet server for your own personal web site there are a number of factors that should be taken into consideration. If you are selecting a internet server for a personal website, rather than a business site, one of your most important considerations may be related to budget.

The good news is that there are a number of providers who offer website hosting space for free. On the surface, this can provide an obvious advantage; however, you should be aware of several factors before making a decision to go with a free internet server. First, realize that internet servers who offer site space for free do so by hosting ads on the site that you open. This is how they pay for the space you take up. Generally, the ads will be related in some way to the content on your site but you will typically not have any control over the types of ads that are posted on your site. Usually the only way you can get rid of the ads on your site is to upgrade to a paid hosting package.

In addition to ads placed on your site, free website hosting providers also typically provide fewer services with free packages. One of the ways this may affect you may include the amount of pages you are able to have on your site. If you are not planning to build a large or extensive site, this usually won’t present any problem. If you plan to cover a lot of material; however, this may end up being quite a challenge, so be sure to take this into consideration.

Another problem you may encounter with free websites involves the number of photos you are allowed to upload onto your site. Photos and graphics take up a tremendous amount of space on website servers and since you are not paying for the space you are taking up and your site is subsidized by advertisers the host cannot usually afford for your site to take up a lot of space. Therefore, they usually must restrict the amount of photos and graphics you can upload. It is quite common for free sites to be limited to 5o0 photos or less.

Your domain name will also be effected by your choice of a free internet service provider account. Frequently, your choice of domain name will include an extension that may be a sub-domain of your host. This can present a problem for some webmasters in that it creates a longer domain name. Long domain names can be hard to remember, hard to spell and even harder for browsers to find; all of which can impact the amount of traffic your site receives.

In addition, while free internet server hosts may provide a wide variety of free site building templates, you may not have access to FTP. FTP refers to file transfer protocol and if you do not have access to this ability it can prevent you from completely customizing your site or even building it from scratch. If you want to have complete control over the way your sites looks, this can present a problem.

Finally, be sure to realize that ad-supported or free internet server accounts will not usually include mailboxes. Again, this may not be a problem depending on your needs and preferences, but it’s a good idea to be fully aware of what you’re getting, or not getting, when signing up for a free account.

Jason Petrina is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit - www.articleclick.com

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