free websites are bad ?

It's not nonsense at all. Whether you pay for hosting, or if you get it for free, you should be prepared to lose your sites at any moment. For that reason, it's necessary for a site to have its own domain and to maintain regular backups.

I've not taken a survey regarding that, but I and others have lost sites on both free and paid hosting. And if it were the case that more of one type of site were taken down than another, it wouldn't eliminate the need to be careful in either situation.

Interesting though, is that I have a site that's been running uninterrupted on a free host for the last 11 years.


At least you'd hope that they'd contact you first. Never count on it though. Always be prepared to lose your sites at any moment.

Sure, they could. But do they? If Blogger takes down a site, or if a host takes down a site, it's usually because of a terms of service violation, and not due to the arbitrary whim of the provider. I'm certain that Blogger doesn't remove sites at random.

People who get their sites taken down often complain that their site was taken down "for no reason", but I think further investigation would prove that such cases were the result of terms of service violation. Of course, nobody thinks that they are in violation of any rules.


The truth is that no matter where you host your site, whether it's a web hosting provider, or a blogging provider, bad stuff can happen and you could lose your site. I've seen it happen with both types of providers. But if a person always keeps regular backups and never hosts a site on a domain belonging to someone else, then they'll be safe and will never lose their sites.

What do you mean?

Are you talking about the host that I mentioned - ServerHub? If that's the case, then I don't think that ServerHub is going out of business anytime soon. They're not some fly by night operation. The people who run SH have been doing hosting for about 14 years. I think they're doing fine as a company.

Whatever the case, and no matter where you host, you will be okay as long as you host your site on a domain you own and you keep backups. There's always problems that can happen which can cause you to lose your site:

• host goes out of business
• host thinks you broke their TOS
• acts of God
• hardware failure
• accidents caused by incompetent hosting company staff (e.g. cd /;rm -Rf *)
• ...other reasons that will surprise you...

Whatever may happen, your site will be fine as long as you have a recent backup of your site and you have your own domain name that you control. You'll be fine if you do those things.

As far as going with hosts that are well known, consider that not all well known hosts are good hosts, and many of them are mediocre at best. And consider that there are some very excellent hosts that do not maintain a big marketing presence. It's a lot like restaurants. McDonalds is really well known, but there exist restaurants that you never heard of that make a hamburger much better than McDonalds can.

"Well known" is relative. Well known to "who"? Well known to "the masses" who don't know a good host from a bad one?

Much of the "well known" hosts on the WF are pretty much just mediocre EIG brands. They are like the McDonald's of hosting. Signing up is quick and easy to understand, but they're nothing spectacular in performance. Most people here don't know squat about hosting. You'd be better off going to webhostingtalk and learn about which hosts are well known over there.

"Well known" isn't necessarily better. It is often an indication of how well a host markets its brand, and not a measure of how well a host performs.