That may as well be the question on your mind right now.  You want to have a web site so that you can advertise and promote your services.  But of course, you have to keep your overhead down or your board members or your wife (whichever is more appropriate in your case) will kill you.  So you may be thinking, you can establish a web site but you do not have to pay for it.  Aha!  Genius!

Not paying for web hosting service is fine if your website is not crucial to your operations.  If you were just riding the bandwagon by having your own web site but do not really need it to boost your business, then your plan is indeed genius.  But if establishing a serious web site is part and parcel of your business plan and is essential to your business growth, staying with a free web hosting site is not genius; it is patently stupid.

Free web hosts have limited resources because you are sharing it with thousands of others who have the same brilliant idea as you.  You have a small space, a small bandwidth, and slow connectivity.  It seems you have very little of everything you might need for a strong web site presence.  But aside from the things you need which you have in minute proportions, free web hosting also gives you more of things that you do not need.

Free web hosts are not in the business for charity.  They are there to make a quick buck, same as everybody else.  Free web hosting therefore means more delays to clients who would have wished to see your web site but just gave up in frustration; frustration that is caused by lots of advertisements.  In free web hosting, you get a lot of ads and there’s not anything you can do about it.  You also get more downtimes as one physical server try to cope with millions of users trying to use its application at one and the same time.

Free web hosting service also does not come with guarantees.  You cannot expect the free web hosts to give you technical support do you?  I mean they may say they will give that to you as well, but you should know better.  You are not paying them for their service.  Therefore, they are not obligated to hold your hand when things go wrong.

A free web hosting service also does not give you the online security that any online business needs.  Your business would hardly make any headway if your web host does not even support security features that make online transactions possible.  If you were the customer and you were asked to give your credit card information to a web site that does not even have its own domain, to buy that admittedly wonderful silver accessory, would you?  I hope not.

And speaking of domain names, of course you still have your own in free web hosting.  But the name of your web site will be way out there near the end.  You will thus not make much impression and you will be very easy to forget.  That’s not very good for business, is it?

So in the question of whether or not you should pay for web hosting, the answer is pretty obvious, don’t you think?