When you develop your first website it comes a moment when you need to transfer all your files to a live server so that you can see what’s working, what isn’t and proceed in the development fixing things and adding what’s required to complete your project.

At this point most users don’t even consider free web hosting but some take into consideration the possibility of using a free web space to host the website until it’s ready to go live.

I regret to tell you that with most free web hosts you’re just going to waste your time.

If your idea is to transfer all your website content, scripts and databases on a free web hosting for a period of time, complete the website and put it on a real web hosting plan only when it’s completed, change your mind. Your idea would be justified if web hosting plans cost ten times what they cost today, but with such low prices there’s really no reason not to buy your hosting now, and save big time and headaches.

Free web hosting services often are not properly configured, have a lot of restrictions, some functions are not enabled or worst, with many of them you will experience more downtime than regular service. In some cases it will be impossible to work on your site. These are just few of the reasons why buying a basic paid web hosting plan is highly recommended for your own productivity and peace of mind.

There are some companies that offer both free basic web hosting plans with many restrictions and paid ones, with less restrictions and better performances.

Let’s remember what happened to GeoCities, a popular free web hosting service offered by Yahoo!®. In 2009 the company announced that the service would be discontinued and on October 27 GeoCities actually became unavailable, counting more than 38 million active pages. Yahoo! offered the possibility to upgrade to their paid hosting services, but this exmaple is just to make you think about free and paid hosting plans.

Whatever your purpose is: getting the word out about something you care about, getting your own company on the web ( or the company you work for ), publishing websites or blogs few bucks a month shouldn’t be a problem ( with few we’re talking about less than 10 dollars per month to get true high quality services: check out the best web hosting providers page ). Any website will generate a return bigger than that in terms of revenue or branding, actually way bigger. Considering that there are plans starting around $3 per month putting your website on a free hosting plan doesn’t make any sense.