Many now-web-savvy folks will be forgiven for not recognizing the “personal” potential of the Internet right at first. In the mid-1990s, as the AOL diskettes and CDs starting clogging grocery aisles and mailboxes everywhere, it seemed that regular folks were supposed to be on “this side” of the digital divide, consuming goods and visiting portals run by the “real companies” on “the other side” of it.


AOL did as much as anyone to (Warning: Cliché Alert) democratize the World Wide Web by allotting its customers a little bit of then-precious server space for “personal pages.” It wasn’t much space, you had to use their built-in tools and the URL could be a mite unwieldy. On the other hand, it was free, right? (Actually, wrong. You had to have a paid AOL account to get it, so it wasn’t really free, was it?) In any event, it was a way to get your own stories and photos (or, perhaps, lies and retouched self-portraits) online for at least a few million people to see. It was a start.


That was then, this is now


What a start it was. Along with everything else that pushed the Internet forward, including the modern equivalent of dirty French postcards, it wasn’t long before people were seeing the sort of supersonic progress they were used to seeing in computers, telecommunications, movie special effects and recorded music. Then the few paid hosting firms became an entire market segment, and with every rung up the ladder of progress and commerce the tech got faster, the results got better and the price got cheaper. Also, the millions of users turned into billions.


That’s progress. The freebie hosting plans really didn’t have to make as much progress as the paid ones, though, because the market for freebie sites no longer attracts people who want real functionality (now that they have a choice). That is to say, free hosting was for a long time a decent way to get a travelogue or personal photo site up for the world to see. Now there’s Flickr and YouTube and a zillion ways to get pics and vids online without having a website or a host of any kind, and without paying much (or anything), either.


The reasons


So, just what are the reasons to choose a professional web host vs. the free hosting that's available? There are plenty, actually, but we’ll stick with the major ones, in no particular order:

• Professional web hosting is dirt cheap, with many so-called “introductory” plans giving you unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth for transfers, unlimited e-mail accounts, etc. No free hosting gets anywhere close to that, and those aforementioned intro plans start at about five bucks a month.
  
  
  
• You are normally limited to using a certain kind of “cookie cutter” or “template” approach to build your free site. You will face restrictions on the number of pages, their layout, the kinds of media you can use and even the content of the copy writing. You might find your site deleted permanently for some sort of impolitic or controversial subject matter, or for no reason at all.

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