In this day and age, creating a website is no longer in the realm of the computer geek that spends countless hours at the keyboard punching out hand written code to build the perfect website. Today, building a website can be as simple as starting up your favourite word processor, designing the layout, adding the content and then saving the document as a web page, but once you have created your site, you need a place to store your website to allow it to be viewed by the rest of the world online. It is at this point you need what is known as 'web hosting'. In its most basic form, a web hosting provider rents you storage space on their web server. Their web server will offer all the necessary features for your site to be viewable on the internet at any time, from anywhere across the world.

Why should you pay for hosting? There are many free web hosting providers on the internet, but firstly you must ask yourself, why are they offering hosting for free, what do they get out of it? This is where the limitations of free web hosting are shown. Firstly, most free web hosting providers will add advertisements to your website. The free hosting provider needs to make money in some way, adding advertisements to every page of your website is one such way for the provider to make money. The addition of the advertisements as you can imagine will detract from the aesthetics of your site, you will also have no control over the content of the advertisements, if your site is for business, it is quite possible to see one of your competitors advertisements on your website.