Should I opt for paid hosting or free hosting?

A couple of years back when I started blogging I was asking this question to myself. Should I opt for paid hosting or free hosting? I was not at all comfortable with the idea of spending around $100/yr for hosting. Initially I started out with Blog Spot, then tried out self hosting Word Press blog. My main aim of creating such a blog was to keep a record of every thing that I had learned over the years, and to gain some visitors to my blog and of course make some money out it.

The biggest problem that I faced when I tried to opt for services like Blog Spot and Self hosted Word Press blog was that I could not gain full control over the system. I wanted to make it look totally different. Either I did not find any free themes that suited me nor was I able to customize the existing themes to my own choice.

Since I was not very satisfied I thought of opting for a content Management System like Joomla, customizing it locally and then uploading it to any Free hosting providers.

One of the biggest issues that I faced when I tried to host it for free was, most of the affiliate networking sites did not approve my site, although for some networks, this was not of a major concern. Some of the merchants, were very much persistent that all their affiliates have a self hosted website with good number of unique visitors. To make it worse the site was very slow and frequently came up with various server errors and also there were various pop up ads running on my site. Later I opted Hostgator as my hosting provider as they had a very good online support system. I found it to be very useful as I could figure out most of the hosting issues that I had, with the support of their chat system. Even now most of the hosting providers do not have such a chat system and you will have to send them a mail regarding the issues you are facing, to which they will respond after a couple of hours.

So the message is, if you are very serious about starting an online business or in other words if you do consider your blog to be very serious you should opt for Paid hosting. If all you wish is a normal blog you can try out self hosted WordPress blog. WordPress has plenty of themes to start with.