When you begin your search for a web host, you will most probably see many web hosting providers offering their services for free. This can sound like a great deal; after all, who would want to pay for something they can get for free? But no matter how wonderful this offer seems, free web hosting has many disadvantages.

- Web hosting services do not differ from other services in that you will get what you pay for. These businesses need to make money somehow; after all, bandwidth isn’t cheap. The way they go about making their money is to place advertisements on your site as a condition of the service. You will have no choice over the types of ads placed on your website. They could be something really inappropriate. If a free service does not seem to have a means of making money from your website then you have to question how long the service will survive.

- Downtime is a big issue with these web hosting providers and they tend to be down more than up. If you were trying to make money from your site, then continuous downtime would be disastrous.

- You are unlikely to get good service support with free web hosting. There is not normally a large business behind free web hosts, whose main focus is on advertising.

- You are unlikely to be given much bandwidth for your website and there may be limitations on the types of files you can upload. Some services insist that you use their templates for your web pages. You may find that the amount of visitors you can attract to your site is limited because of this. These sites are normally seen as very unprofessional and can be quite a turn off to potential visitors.

- Although many paid web hosting providers will give you features such as free email accounts, you will find that most free web hosts do not offer the same thing.

When you decide to go into internet marketing, you should make sure that you have hosting set up beforehand. The web hosting world can be a confusing one though for a newbie. For example, you may come across reseller web hosting or even linux web hosting when you are looking at different hosting plans.