Short and sweet: should I change from my free host to a paid host? my site isn't that aged yet, growing pains are a good sign, right? My site is a software download site that makes (admittedly little) money from ads. The site has become much more than I first pictured, and I want to make it bigger - better - stronger. I also want to do the right thing - consulting the wise old men and women here... I am wondering how much of a difference it would make to host my site on a server that isn't running 171 other sites. Even though my traffic is only at 5% of the allowable threshold, there are seemingly random periods of a few minutes when I can't access any page on my web. I have recently had two weeks each with 72 hours of down time. That would be completely unacceptable, but it is a free host. Given problems like these, the benefit to cost ratio of any paid hosting has got to be worth it, right? Wouldn't another consideration be to have over 95+% uptime? Especially since a high percentage of users are expected to be organically sent via search engine and less than 10% bookmark visitors. I know that somebody here must have been through the same experience before. I have searched around for an answer to this and have read enough posts to make my eyes blurry. PM for info on my site mentioned above.
Id suggest going straight to paid. Its totally worth it. You have great support to rely on, and get some sort of satisfaction that your paying for something good.
Well I think with the prices of paid hosting and with what you get for it you can go straight to paid. However, with sites like T35.com , Netfirms etc. you can try their free hosting... and just upgrade straight to paid without moving anything etc.
There is a difference between free hosting and paid hosting, but what I think you are talking about is going to a dedicated server which your site would be the only one on it. I take it that people download the software from your site. If so another way to cut down on server usage is through hosting the files to download through a third party. A dedicated server would give you the full resources of the server just for your site.
Or virtual dedicated. You would still share your server with some other accounts, but far less than on a shared host. On the other hand, even a paid shared host would not exhibit the amount of downtime you are talking about.
I would say go with paid hosting! Even though you're making little with ads, I'm sure you can make atleast $3.99 a month? (that's the price for hosting at go-daddy). You won't loose any visitors from downtime since they are highly reliable
I definitely agree, go paid. It's worth every penny. I went shared hosting for about 2 years but I finally got fed up with it. Now I use dedicated+managed services and have never looked back. I can manage my own software versions and manage every bit of my server down to the bios, I'll never go back to shared hosting as long as I'm in this biz.
Are you really even spending the time THINKING about this? Paid hosting is anywhere from $1 to $10+ a month, you can find more then that under your couch. Skip a coffee and you already have the money for paid hosting. Skip a starbucks coffee and you have enough money for premium hosting, lol.
Yeah what's four bucks a month ? May as well be free. Not even worth debating if you want to do anything substantial on the web.
I agree that the best option would be to go with a Dedicated host since it is the most reliable. However, if you are going to choose a shared host, Zeeblo is the best. Zeeblo has been running for over a year and has a 99.5% uptime guarantee(never broke that). It offers Cpanel with fantastico and has the best hosting community you can find. I defenitely would choose Zeeblo over any paid host. Did I mention that its free,your site would never tell.
I am going shopping for a paid domain today... just have to change out of my PJ's.... I think that it was a nice run - getting started for free is sweet, but I expect other benefits to being hosted on a dedicated or semi-dedicated server. I actually experienced two hours of down time this morning! Thanks for all of the feedback -- it seems that everybody agrees that paid is worth it over free. Does anybody have anything to add add - for Pro's and Con's of a paid hosting? Would one of the benefits of paid hosting be the increased indexing of pages by search engine bots? I have read that bots index a higher percentage of pages from distinct servers (due somehow to less competing content on the same server). Perhaps that's a question for a different forum here...
They nickel and dime you. My site is currently on that plan, but not for long. It's limited to 10 pages, a lot of the website builders aren't compatible, you can use theirs for only 3.95 more for month. On and on. My blog based on a book Missed Fortune 101 is currently on the front page of Google for that keyword, my purpose was to direct hits to my site, which it's done, but not to a great extent given the fact that that term isn't one of the most popular. I haven't seen much from Google, but then again, I average next to nothing in montly clicks.
Thanks for all of the feedback on this issue - I think that my mind was made up before posting this thread. There are some more benefits that I can now list: automatic http compression with new host more bandwidth than I'll need for years MB and GB!!! I have space - no worries about expanding now. quicker response - don't have to share with 170+ other sites no more 5xx errors in Google Sitemaps
You must be paying alot for your hosting if you're not sharing with 170+ sites. Go to http://www.whois.sc and check out how many other sites are actually sharing your server! Be careful of the more bandwidth and MBs thing, a lot of hosts over sell because they know that on average most sites use less than 100 Megs.
You can consider a high end VPS as well. Cheaper option than dedicated if you wont need the full power of a dedicated. Zac
You can read my article "How To Choose The Best Shared Web Hosting Plan?" here : http://hostmoz.com/articles/how-to-choose-the-best-shared-web-hosting-plan-13.html
Please check your PM and revert. Also, I guess this is in wrong category. you should have choosen web hosting