Free Ecommerce Web Hosting Top 5 Mistakes Free Ecommerce Website Hosting Reviews and Comments HostIndex.com User Email: Should I get Free Ecommerce Web Hosting for my new website store? Our Answer: In the ten years, we have been reviewing and watching the free ecommerce hosting space evolve, we haven't been impressed enough yet to make this recommendation. Too many free ecommerce hosting users are either missing out on the advantages of paid ecommerce hosting plans or are experiencing the disadvantages of free ecommerce website hosting. For some, online free ecommerce hosting is a must because they don't have the $5 a month it costs to purchase quality ecommerce hosting. But if you are serious about doing business online, our experience shows that free ecommerce web hosting will lead to many problems! Here 5 important factors to remember when you decide whether or not to get free ecommerce web hosting. As an alternative to free ecommerce web hosting, we recommend 4 low cost web hosts that offer budget ecommerce hosting plans without the problems associated with free ecommerce web hosting. They are: HostMonster, BlueHost, IX Web Hosting, and StartLogic. Visit each of them after you think about the Top 5 Problems with Free Ecommerce Hosting to see if you can justify the upgrade to your hosting experience. #1 Advertisements Free ecommerce hosting plans almost always make you display advertising. In order for a free ecommerce hosting provider to make money they must cover the cost of their bandwidth and servers. That's the reason behind forced advertising with free ecommerce hosting packages. The problem is that these ads are usually targetted to your website demographics which means a competitors advertisement could appear within your store and you could lose that customer forever. With low cost ecommerce hosting, you completely avoid this problem. #2 Duplication A free ecommerce web hosting solution sounds great. But will you still have to buy normal web hosting for your website itself. Getting a free ecommerce hosting plan is often a myth. You might receive a free shopping cart application with your free ecommerce web hosting plan, but then read the fine print and you will discover you need to buy a small web space hosting plan (often quite expensive) to run your free ecommerce hosting package on. By purchasing low cost ecommerce web hosting upfront, you avoid this problem associated with free hosting accounts.. #3 Reliability If something is free, think about how reliable it is. Paid hosting usually delivers 99.9% uptime, but free ecommerce hosting can often be down for days. Is uptime important to your free online ecommerce store? If it is, go with paid hosting. If your website can't be accessed because your free ecommerce hosting provider is offline, what is the value of the lost sale. You can buy a top-ranked ecommerce hosting plan for less than $75/year. If you lose just 1 customer because of downtime, have you lost more than $75? Probably. Think again about the real hidden costs of free ecommerce web hosting. #4 Technology Would you want an old car when a new car is available? Of course not. That's the problem with free ecommerce hosting. Free ecommerce hosting often uses "old technology" where the licensing fees are less. This means that you have less functionality in your hosting plan if you elect to choose free ecommerce web hosting. If server uptime, the newest shopping cart features, and so on is important, be sure to buy budget ecommerce hosting instead of old-technology free ecommerce web site hosting. #5 Free Ecommerce Website Hosting is Unsupported - Perhaps one of the biggest free ecommerce web hosting disadvantages is the lack of support. Since you aren't paying for anything with free ecommerce hosting, you are not going to get ANY technical support. Your free ecommerce web host simply can't afford to offer it. If you are a business online, you can't afford in the long-run to lack technical support - especially since things can and will always go wrong (at some point) with an ecommerce store front. Free Ecommerce web hosting puts you at a lower status than your peers; it isn't worth the risk! Choose low cost ecommerce web hosting and skip this problem. Get High-Quality Ecommerce Hosting for $5.95/mo.! These Free Ecommerce Hosting tips and things to think about aren't a complete answer. But they give you some things to start running through your mind. If you are international and can't afford a few bucks a month for ecommerce hosting, it might be a workable solution. But for businesses in the United States (US), Canada, the UK, or any other developed country, choosing free ecommerce website hosting over a low cost ecommerce hosting solution is a bad idea. The above reasons are just a few thoughts why we believe this to be the case. It's not that all free ecommerce web hosting is bad, it's just that the potential risk and "hidden costs" of free ecommerce hosting outweigh the good that comes with a free ecommerce web hosting package. Have comments about free ecommerce web hosting? We are currently gathering user reviews of free ecommerce hosting providers for our new complimentary ecommerce hosting report. We would appreciate your experiences, good or bad, with a description of the advantages and disadvantages of your particular host, for our new book. Send commentary to feedback@hostindex.com.