Free Hosting Bundled With a Domain

The offer at the end of checkout

A business registers its domain name, and the last screen of checkout offers more: a free website to go with it, hosting included, built with a tool that runs in the browser.

It feels like the natural next step. A template takes a minute to choose, and the site could be live by evening without another bill.

So the box gets ticked, and a few pages go up: what the business does, a phone number, a contact form, some photographs from a phone.

For a while it does the job. The cost arrives later, when the site needs something the free plan was never built for.

What usually comes without it

Free plans differ, but these gaps turn up again and again.

• Backups you can ask to have restored, or any copy at all.
• Support from people who deal with websites, not domain renewals.
• Speed, on servers shared with a great many other free sites.
• A certificate for HTTPS on your own domain, without a yearly fee.
• Email at your domain, often an extra or forwarding only.
• An export, meaning a way to take the site somewhere else.

The last decides what the free site really costs. Most of the rest can be added or worked around; a site that cannot leave is rebuilt from nothing when the business outgrows it.

Why it is offered free

A domain company earns its living from renewals and add-ons. A free site keeps the domain where it is, and gives the company a place to offer upgrades.

There is nothing underhand in that, but it shapes the product. Your pages live inside the company's own builder, in a form only that builder can read.

What makes it easy to start is exactly what makes it hard to leave.

A backup is something you can get back

Many free plans say little about backups. A company copying its own servers for disaster recovery is not the same as a copy of your site that you can ask for.

The test is plain. If somebody deleted the services page this afternoon, could it be put back as it was yesterday? On many free builders, only by retyping it.

Proper hosting keeps daily copies away from the server, and somebody has tried a restore before the day it matters.

Support for the domain, not the site

A domain company's support is usually good at domains: renewals, transfers, and the settings that point a name at a server.

A contact form that stopped sending, or a layout broken on phones, is a different question. On a free plan it tends to meet help articles and a ticket queue.

The person you want answering is one who already knows your site.

Speed now counts on phones

Since July 9, Google has used page speed in its rankings for searches on phones. Only the slowest pages are affected, and crowded free servers are a common source of them.

Builders add weight of their own, loading scripts for every feature they offer whether your four pages use them or not. And speed is a gap nobody can close from inside a free plan.

Not secure since Tuesday

Since Tuesday, every page without HTTPS opens in Chrome with Not secure printed next to its address.

Certificates have been free for some years, and good hosting includes them as a matter of course. Some free site plans offer none on a custom domain, or sell one as a yearly extra.

Open the site in Chrome today. If the label is there, every visitor sees it before anything else.

A worked example

A personal trainer who works with clients in a small private studio and in their homes registered her name as a domain three years ago, and accepted the free website offered at checkout.

She built four pages in an evening, and while most clients came by referral, that was enough. Once, the testimonials page was deleted by accident during an edit, with no copy to restore.

This spring she wanted online booking and an intake form. The builder could not embed the booking system she had chosen, and its form could not ask the questions she needed.

When she asked a web company to move the site, there was nothing to move: no files, no export, only text to copy out page by page.

The new site went onto proper hosting, with the domain left in her own account and pointed at it. The builder pages were switched off the day it went live.

Keep the domain in your own hands

Whatever the site runs on, register the domain to the business itself, with login details the owner can always reach.

Hosting is then a separate choice. The domain points at the site through a few settings, called DNS records, which take minutes to change, so either can move without the other.

A free site that is part of the domain registration removes that freedom. Moving the domain ends the site, so the site quietly decides where the domain stays.

What proper hosting includes

Proper hosting is less about price than about what a business can rely on without thinking about it.

Daily backups kept off the server and restored on request. A free certificate. A current version of PHP, the language WordPress runs on. Enough capacity to stay quick at the busiest hour.

Above all, a site in a standard form, such as WordPress, whose files and database can be copied to another server whenever the business chooses.

Hosting looked after by the company that maintains the site adds what no plan sells: somebody who knows the site when it breaks.

The counter-case

A free site has its uses, as long as everyone knows what it is.

It can hold a phone number while a business gets ready to open or its real site is built, with the text and photographs kept in your own files.

For any site the business depends on: keep the domain in your own account, host the site properly, and make sure it can move.

Before ticking the box

1. Keep the domain in an account you control.
2. Ask how a backup is restored, and by whom.
3. Check for a free certificate on your domain.
4. Ask how the site can be exported later.
5. Find out who answers when something breaks.
6. Test the speed on a phone.
7. Keep your own copies of text and photographs.

Step four decides whether the site is an asset or a draft. One that can be exported can be moved and improved; one that cannot is retyped page by page, as the personal trainer found.

Once the hosting is chosen, the next trap is the length of the term, covered in prepaying hosting for three years.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.