Free hosting sites are ideal for the home user and the beginner looking for a place to explore their web building skills.  Such sites often survive off advertising and your site could be embellished with banners, possibly even from your prospective competitors!  For more secure hosting needs, quality often comes at a price.

Reliability and service are usually options in life that you have to pay for.  Website hosting is no different.  For a small online business user looking to host their site professionally, selecting the right host can be a difference between prosperity and wasted time dealing with servers being down.  Service reliability of free hosts often entail more frequent sessions of downtime, meaning time that customers could be accessing your shopping cart is lost.

Depending on your website needs, not paying can cost.  There will invariably be limits to a cheaper hosting account, whether that is bandwidth or traffic limits, along with lower server speeds and restriction of file upload sizes.

To make the impact with your website you will need as many of the elements that a good hosting site can offer, things that could be missing or requiring package upgrades anyway from free hosts. The growth of your site is important to think about when starting out. The upgrade ability or having to change hosts down the line can be time consuming.

Finding the hosting company that is right for you is a selection process that will come down to personal preference.  Hosting company reviews and testimonials are worth checking out, along with comparing exactly what you are getting, and paying attention to what it is that you are not.