There are many misconceptions on how much it costs to build a website. There are hundreds of websites and ads saying ‘Build a Free Website’.
There is an old saying, “Nothing in life is free” and when looking to launch a website, you should keep this in the back of your mind as a reminder.
Most companies which offer ‘free websites’ are offering the ability to build a free website, but when it comes time to actually publish your website, there is a publishing fee. Other companies will publish your website for free on a subdomain (yourwebsite.freewebsitebuilder.com) but will charge you a monthly fee to launch your website on your domain.
Before You Sign-Up For a Free Website
If it says ‘free’ doesn’t that mean ‘FREE’? It may be free for you to build the website, but it will end up costing you something to launch it. The facts are, it isn’t possible for a company to stay alive if it’s giving away free hosting, as well as a free web builder.
Once built, you may not be able to move your website
Unfortunately, once you’ve built your website using a ‘free’ builder, you can’t usually move your website anywhere else. You are locked into using that service. Even if you wanted to move to a hosting provider, most of these services will not allow you to move the website.
The templates provided restrict you to only so many features
A lot of the ‘free website’ services offer drag and drop templates that you can use to build your website. These can work for specific features, but if you want to make any custom changes or add new ones, some will give you an option, but charge for them. Others don’t offer any additional features.
Your website will be branded by the provider
Most ‘free’ website providers, will place an advertisement or logo over your website, unless you pay to remove it. That’s because the site is still proprietary to that site provider, so a lot of times you will see their company name stamped at the bottom or in the footer of every page.This may not be an issue for some, but if you start driving traffic to your website, you want to have a safe place where your visitors can trust the content which will be displayed. In this case, you can only control so much.
The Best Solution
As you can see, launching a free website is truly not possible. The best solution to launch a website affordably is to use a trusted hosting provider where you own everything and have complete control. InMotion Hosting offers affordable shared hosting which not only provides hosting and content management system options, but also 24/7/365 professional U.S. based support. If you have a question or concern, send us an email, open a chat, or give us a call.
At InMotion Hosting, you have the ability to choose any content management system (CMS) to launch your website, such as WordPress, the #1 CMS Platform. We also provide free installation of a WordPress website builder, free or premium with some plans. This will provide you over 200+ unique, customizable themes, and an easy drag-and-drop editor, along with that site ownership.
We don’t brand or place advertisements on your website. It is your property and we protect your privacy, allowing your customers to trust the content on your website. If you decide that you want to move your website, you can take a backup, and you can move to any hosting provider. That’s the trust we build and instill to our customers, along with a 90 day money back guarantee. But, we promise you so much satisfaction that you probably won’t want to. Learn more about our solutions to find one that best meets your needs and goals.
