So many things on the web operate on the freemium model, so we are all accustomed to expect freebies. However, if you are a business, the one thing that you definitely should invest in is your web presence. Given the low cost of webhosting and domain registration these days, it is simply not worth it to use free webhosting. Here are some of the issues and disadvantages the comes with free webhosting:

You may not be worried about the size of your website right now, but if you are planning to post regularly, include supporting images and eventually add video or audio, bandwidth is an important consideration. Free web servers only provide limited amounts of space. Blogger, for example, has a total of 1GB of image storage and a limit of 1MB in page size. There’s also a 250MB size limit to any photos you upload through your mobile device. WordPress.com provides a total of 3GB of storage for your files and images. That may sound like a lot, but when you consider that you should be uploading high quality, pinnable images with every post if you want to be impactful, you’ll use up that space fairly quickly.

If you surpass that, you can upgrade either service for a fee – but if you’re going to spend, why not start off with the better option of investing in a professional web host?

To capture an audience, a stand out design is necessary.

As your blog grows, you may want to offer advertising on your site, add social media sharing or even offer useful functions, like attaching related links to your post, with the right plugins. Blogger, WordPress.com and other blog hosting service are limited in the number of designs they offer and plugins or widgets they allow you to use. In addition, there may be compatibility issues with getting approved plugins to work properly. While there are workarounds for those more adept in HTML and programming, backend updates like these are more challenging when using free hosting services. They also can prohibit some 3rd party services. For example, WordPress.com will not allow you to run Rafflecopter, which allows you to easily administer giveaways, an excellent way to generate traffic and work with brands. Paying for hosting eliminates these problems and provides flexibility to grow, expand and customize your site or blog as you see fit.

Whether you are blogging or getting online for a fledgling business, you will want to promote your site, work with brands, or offer products and advertising. Free web hosting sites look unprofessional and potential clients and employers may pass you up for opportunities. Keep in mind, too, that if you sign up with a free hosting service provider, you’ll need to have your own email without the hosting name it, making it harder for your contacts to remember you.

Many people start blogging with the idea of attracting income, a highly achievable goal, however, free web hosting providers can prohibit or restrict your ability to monetize your blog. In fact, they can actually cause you to lose income. For example, Blogger’s free service will not allow you to post any ads on your site that are not Google ads, which can be difficult to earn an income from. At WordPress.com, on the other hand, you cannot use Google AdSense or any third party advertising with their free service. You are also expressly forbidden from running sponsored or paid posts or content. (See their advertising policy here.)

Google owns Blogger, which may help some Blogger sites gain better ranking – how much it does, though, is still a topic of debate. However, other sites are not in question – free hosting provides no assistance whatsoever for search engine optimization.

In fact, a number of common free hosting problems can actually harm your search engine performance.

Slow website speed, website going down too often, having your “top level” domain hosted outside your country, database errors and caching issues can hurt your search engine optimization efforts, especially on Google. Another problem is that low quality spam sites, which are often hosted on free servers, share your web hosting and can lead to poor ranking for your site in any search engine. You can avoid many of those issues with quality, paid-for web hosting.

Many years ago, I had a web client who found a strange page on her site. I logged into her host to discover that her hosting service had placed entire pages of ads on her website that we were unable to remove. It turned out to be a small line her contract and we were powerless to disable this free advertising. Your hosting contract can cover other restrictions and terms you may not like.

For example, both Blogger and WordPress.com reserve the right to advertise on your blog and can legally distribute and modify the material on your blog. You also to carefully read the rules and regulations, right down to the fine print, of Blogger, WordPress, or any other free hosting services provider and strictly adhere to them or your site can and will be shut down. This is, of course, true of paid web hosting as well, but there are far less rules to adhere, other than the standard laws of the land, such as spam compliance policies. When reading the terms of service forBlogger and WordPress.com, remember those are general terms. There are many links to more detailed information about what you can and cannot do with your site. Finally, you will only get limited a amount of customer service – if any – for your technical difficulties, whereas paid services generally offer a great deal of support.

In 2011, Blogger.com did an update that unintentionally locked users out of their sites overnight. That doesn’t sound too bad, but what if you were launching a game or book, timed just at the hour of the lockout? What if you suddenly got a spam attack that overloaded your account?

It’s as simple as this: you get what you pay for.

Free hosting providers simply cannot afford to provide you the security you need, which is part of the reason why the more trustworthy providers limit functionality. Remember that client I discussed in the last bullet? While searching her site, I stumbled into other hosting clients on the same server. Hopefully, poorly secured web servers like that are a thing of the past, but you don’t want to expose your site to poor security that’s not robust enough to survive a full-blown malware attack.

You might think you’d first like to try this service to see if blogging or a website is a good fit for you. I have no argument with that, but keep in mind the future hassles that transferring to a new domain will bring such as downtime while your site is transferred. Exporting and importing can go flawlessly, or unforeseen errors can make it a nightmare. Transferred content can contain glitches that are time consuming to fix. You also need to make sure that your permalinks are consistent between services, your RSS feed doesn’t lose subscribers and that all your redirects still work for pages that have been moved or removed. Finally, you will need to redirect your readers to the new site. That’s all achievable, but you can save all that effort by starting with a paid web host.

Free web hosting has a lot of pitfalls, while paid web hosting nowadays is fairly affordable. You can register your domain name for less that $15 a year, and there are many high-quality hosting services that have packages starting under $10 a month. You’d be smart to do some research first, and ask the right questions before signing up for a paid service, but investing a small amount of money into web hosting will provide you security and flexibility, and put you in full control of your website.

When you don’t own your own site, you have no power over its existence or presence. The company can decide to take away your free-dom any time. Your site can be removed for many reasons.

When you use free webhosting, you are paying for it by allowing the host to place advertisements on your website. You will have banners and/or pop-up ads on your homepage and/or all of your pages. You will have no control over the kind of ads that show up on your site or how they show up on your website. While there are free hosts that does not force advertising, they tend to close down with alarming frequency due to lack of revenue.

When you have your own website, you can even make money from placing your own advertising.

Let’s face it, you are telling the world that you are cheap and small fry. For less than $10 per month you can own your own hosting, and for as low as $10 a year you can have your own domain name. If you are hosting your business on yourbusiness.freesite.com instead of yourbusiness.com, it tells your potential customers that you don’t take your business all that seriously.

It’s not just the visitors to your website, but the search engines will also not take you quite as seriously.

Your website will be limited by what templates the free webhosting company offer you. Often you won’t be able to change look and feel easily, change layout, or add interactive features (e.g. plugins, shopping carts, forums, chat rooms, etc.).

You get what you pay for — if you find a good webhost, you often get support and reliability. With free webhosts, there is no guarantee of reliability and if you have problems you are on your own.

Free hosting don’t have generally have a great reputation for speed, uptime, and availability. They also tend to shut down a lot. Remember GeoCities? That is long dead. Free hosting is only ok for people who don’t care if their site is very available. It’s OK for hobby sites, for testing, but definitely not for business.