With free ecommerce web hosting you get a directory or a subdomain on a server which you don't have to pay for. Generally, free web hosting providers make revenue from the advertisements they put on your website or in the file manager. They also hope at some point you will choose to upgrade your hosting package and pay for additional services.

When Can You Use Free Ecommerce Web Hosting?

While you can use ecommerce free web hosting for personal pages and small business use, you will need to upgrade your hosting package when your business start's to develop.

The reason you should not get free ecommerce web hosting for larger business use is that these services are not usually reliable. They can get easily abused, causing the server to have a lot of downtime. In addition, you usually have a file size limit and small bandwidth. If you exceed the bandwidth limit many providers will suspend you access. Hotlinks are not allowed and you cannot upload certain file types, such as MP3 or MPEG.

Tips For Choosing The Right Free Ecommerce Host

The first thing to find out is if the provider gets its money from the free ecommerce web hosting itself, as this means it is more reliable. Secondly, you should register to a selective host that accepts only quality websites. You can take a look at the other pages hosted there to see what kind of banners and pop-ups they have and check server speed. Read the Terms of Service carefully to see if they suit your needs.

If you are using a search engine to look for a free ecommerce web hosting provider, you may discover that there are a lot of commercial websites that claim they are offering free hosting, but in fact you have to buy your own domain name.

You could use a review website to look over the reviews and ratings of different free ecommerce web hosting providers. However, some of them have not been updated in a while and the information may no longer be reliable, mainly because web hosts change very fast.

A good review website updated daily is Free Web Hosting, which has a listing of approximately 600 free hosting providers with reviews and ratings. You can search their database for free ecommerce web hosting providers featuring the characteristics you need. (e.g. ASP, MySQL, PHP, CGI etc.)

Reliable Free Web Hosting Providers

Here is a listing of the three most recommended free web hosting providers:

* 50webs

* FriHost

* Yahoo Geocities

However, these are just some examples to offer you a general idea about what to look for when choosing a free ecommerce web hosting provider. You are the only one who can decide what are the features that you need and which free web hosting service, if any, can suit your needs best.

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