6 Little Known Factors That Could Affect Your “Free” Website

All start up businesses want to preserve as much cash as possible. For entrepreneurs this usually entails doing as much as you can DIY style and getting as much as you can for free. This is led way for an entire industry of companies that specialize in offering free website. I am going to show you a few reasons why you may not want to trust your business to that model.

Danger your search engine rankings

Small business owners often come to me saying that they want a web site and already have a website somewhere else. They are often unsatisfied with the free site and have built up enough clientele to pay for a “good” web site. The problem is that they lose all of the link love and SEO worth that Google, Yahoo and Bing have already given them. They now have to go through a complicated process of redirecting links. So now the old site is ranking at the top of search engines and they have to start the process of being found on on the search engines all over again.

They could shut down

You have not paid for anything and do not own anything. This is the equivalent of planning to raise your kids and family in an apartment where you don’t pay rent. If at any point the company offering the free site goes out of business your website goes offline. If you have built a good following, overnight your customers may be left in the dark

They could start charging fees

What if out of the blue they realize that the free model does not work and decide to start charging fees? You have just left your business at the whims of someone else with noway out. With paid hosting the site is yours to take with you if the hosting company decides to price gouge.

They can take over your subdomain

Many free site come at an address like yourite.theirsite.com. What you may not know is that theirsite.com actually owns your website. So if you have built a lot of traffic and they see that they can profit more by switching your domain to something they own it is very often their right to do so. Part of that pesky fine print that no one read!

They could get banned

If a lot of people build their sites with the “free: service and begin using them to create low quality, spammy or explicit content, google may decide to downgrade or ban theirsite.com and your site goes down with them.

So take control of the destiny f your business and make sure you own your domain and your website!

 

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