So you're thinking about using a free web host instead of a paid hosting service are you? Well before you dive right in, you might want to consider a few things first. But rather than give you the cold hard facts, I'll illustrate my reasoning's with my colorful, yet insightful little story that includes a free web host and a lot of beautiful women. It all started one afternoon when I was surfing around the web when I suddenly got an idea. I said to myself: "Mike, let's see how much traffic you can generate to a website that you built in one day." That seemed like a simple, yet interesting challenge. But what would I make the site about? What topic could possibly drive tons of visitors to a website that was built in just one day? I thought about this for awhile and then it hit me. If I really wanted a site to attract lots of visitors quickly, I should make it about beautiful women. Not a porn website or anything like that. Just a simple picture page site featuring scantily clad females. So off I went, scouring the web for pictures, downloading them, organizing them, and finally making thumbnails. I created 5 pages of 20 thumbnails each and linked all the pages together. Then I registered my site at the first free web host I could find, and set up my 1-day site challenge. Once it was done, I honestly had no clue if I would attract any type of traffic at all. But I figured it was worth a shot so I decided to leave my site alone and check back within a month. Well, a month came and went, and once I checked my stats, I nearly fell off my chair. With absolutely no advertising of any kind I had received over 3,000 unique visitors. How did that happen? To this day I still don't know, but needless to say, after seeing that number 3,000 on my stats page, two things happened to me. First, I was completely shocked. I had never expected to receive that kind of traffic from a site I built in just one day, especially where I didn't advertise it at all. The second thing that happened was that it gave me a sense of motivation like I've never felt before. While this was the most basic of websites, it still attracted visitors. Granted, having the pictures of beautiful women didn't hurt, but still, it was something that I created and it received attention. This did a number on my self esteem (basically sky rocketed it), and from that day on, I vowed to make my site one of the best on the web. I added tons of images. I changed the layout several times. I went out and traded links (all done manually) with other webmasters, and my traffic sky rocketed even more! I reached a point where I was getting 400 unique visitors a day! That's 12,000 people coming to my site every month! I spent months planning on how to make my site better and get even more traffic! It was like an addiction. I couldn't stop. I wanted more visitors! More traffic! Everything was about my site and how to make it better. Heck even my homepage button on my web browser was set to it. But then, one day I woke up, turned on my computer, clicked my homepage button and guess what? My site was gone. After cursing in 4 languages, and eating 2 boxes of cookies I finally calmed down. What in the world happened to my site? Well, since my site was hosted on a free web host, I was allowed very little monthly bandwidth. I had received so much traffic that I far exceeded my bandwidth limit by a factor of twenty. My free hosting provider never bothered to warn me or contact me. They offered no alternate solution to my bandwidth hogging website. They just deleted it. All of my hard work was gone in just one day. It's ironic since it was gone in the same amount of time that it was first built. Now you understand why free web hosting doesn't mix with beautiful women. |
