A friend of mine, @richpilkington, writes :
You might know that if you have a domain name you can map it to a service like wordpress.com so instead of your website being http://yourwhatever.wordpress.com it will be http://yourwhatever.com.au … instructions here. It’s actually $13 USD per year but that’s still cheaper than most hosting. This essentially means that you don’t need web hosting and can save yourself some money.
To do this, you still need DNS hosting so you could use a service like http://freedns.afraid.org/ or ask your domain registra if they’ll offer free DNS hosting (many do these days).
But what about email? Well using your free DNS service you can point the mail to Google’s MX servers and setup Google Apps for your domain for free which gives you 10 mailboxes each over 7.5 GB large! Not to mention advanced webmail, IMAP, anti spam etc etc. (In fact, we like this service so much we encourage our own customers to use it.)
So why, pray tell, would you need to pay for hosting at all?
Well you don’t. And that’s a hard thing for me to tell you from the helm of a website hosting company, but let’s be honest… these large cloud companies have huge infrastructure and great services for free. I won’t pretend we (or any small to medium sized hosting company) can compare.
But (you knew that was coming right?), not everyone knows how to edit DNS zones, setup MX records, use FTP to validate domains and all the other technical steps required to make this happen. It’s still technical, and if you’re not comfortable managing DNS, upgrades and code you might find it difficult to setup and manage.
Furthermore, while these services are free, who do you call when things go wrong? You get what you pay for, and you certainly don’t get a support number to call.
Another thing to consider is the loss of control. With free services you are at the mercy of their systems and their software. If they decide to make a change that breaks your website or your email there is no recourse. Consider the hundreds of thousands of websites that were lost when GeoCities closed or when BlogSpot shutdown FTP publishing and changed their subdomain. If you invest effort in these free providers you risk losing your investment should circumstances change.
Consider the restrictions in WordPress.com’s terms : “The Domain Mapping Upgrade does not enable the permission to use advertising, any kind of prohibited code, or upload additional themes or plugins. With the upgrade, your blog will still be hosted here at WordPress.com, which means that you will not have FTP access to your files and you will still be required abide by our Terms of Service.”
Finally, there is the notion of your intellectual property and privacy. The trade you make for the free hosting is that your work is often signed over legally, to the host. (Yes, Google’s T&Cs reserve the right to use your content any way they like). They also use your information for marketing and advertising purposes and if your content is legally or politically sensitive you expose yourself to further risks. Often these trade offs are perfectly fine, but sometimes they are worth noting.
Ultimately, I believe it comes down to service. My customers host with me because I take care of all that for them. Many don’t know what DNS is or how an Apache server works and they don’t need to. A website host is paid to be a concierge of sorts, between you, your website and the hosting. And a good host will take care of the behind the scenes stuff and give you good advice and support when you need it.