Free website hosting comes with a catch: your web hosting service will put advertisement banners on your website pages.  This will make your business look unprofessional.  Anyone looking for business web hosting can find an affordable alternative to free hosting.  A business web hosting package that covers just the basics: small scale file hosting with an FTP account, can be had for just a few dollars per month.

If you have a simple website, incorporating just html pages and it doesn’t need to do anything but show the public information about your store, then you can get away with a very cheap business web hosting package.  All you need is for your web hosting service to provide you with space on their server, connectivity to the Internet, and the ability to upload your files to  your account, usually via ftp, or file transfer protocol services.

In the past, many web hosting providers charged by the page, but that should be a thing of the past.  You should not go with any provider that tries to charge you this way.  These days, when many business web hosting clients sell their products online, there can be lots of pages on one site.  It shouldn’t cost you more money with more pages.  Look for the term unlimited disk space when you’re shopping around.

Of course we all want affordable web hosting, no matter what type of websites we have.  There are lots of web host companies offering very affordable web hosting packages, and it’s up to you to know what you need and what matters the most.

For a basic, personal website, it used to be popular to get free web hosting by allowing your host to put ads on your pages.  Nowadays, there are a lot more options for affordable web hosting, and people are moving away from the free hosting with ads.

If you are looking for affordable web hosting for a business website, you want your hosting to be affordable, but not low quality.  Look for guarantees of uptime when you shop around.  Look for a more comprehensive package that offers database support and the ability to use application platforms such as PHP and Java.

Chances are, a business website may offer product listings online, and you need a database package, plus ability to handle application languages to make the database connect to your website live and show pages of products.

Even if you don’t plan on putting products online, you may still want to use other applications that require a platform language such as PHP.  Forums, anti-spam contact forms, or even a blog require something like PHP web hosting.