There are advantages and disadvantages with everything in life. The same could be said for free or paid web site hosting. The advantage of free hosting is of course that it is free. This sort of hosting such as GeoCities is great for personal and family sites.

Why do these providers give you a free site? Your free site will attract visitors. You will invite visitors, your visitors will invite still others and so on. Your free web site provider will place ads on your site. Some of your visitors may click in the ad links provided. This brings income for your free web site provider.

Now let's say you don't want just a personal site, but you want to make money from your site. Now a free site becomes a hindrance instead of a help.

If you are promoting a product it is important to come across as a professional and not as a rank amateur. A free site will make your product look cheap. Then there is the problem of focusing on your product. You will need to get your message across to your potential customer. You don't need them to become distracted by the ads that are on your site. In the end your "free site"may in fact be costing you money in sales.

If you are promoting a product you will always be better off with a paid site. You will need to choose the hosting package that will suit your needs. Some of the benefits of a paid site are:

· Can create a number of email accounts. This means that your email address will look more professional. Your email will look like this yourname@yoursite.com That will look a lot more professional than yourname@yahoo.com or any of the free email sites. I personally won't do business with anyone who uses a free email account as their support address, I feel it's too risky.

· You will be able to use PHP and CGI scripts

· You will also have access to MySql databases

· You will have a much larger amount of disk space available to you.

· You will have the use of an easy to use control panel. This will also give you great control over your site.

There are many reasons to choose a paid web host provider. These are just a few.

You can choose to start small and expand. This can be done painlessly as your hosting provider just increases the limits that have been set with the package you chose at first.

In summary: a free web site host is good for non commercial sites such as family or personal sites. If you want to sell anything on line you will be far better of paying for your web hosting provider. You can always start small and expand as you go.