Should I Use Free Hosting for my Blog?

A bit of a change of topic today but recently there has been a big question bouncing around inside my head. “Should I Use Free Hosting for my Blog?” For you as a reader the difference is minimal, but if you are also running your own blog, it may well be a question you’ve been asking yourself. I therefore thought I’d jot down some of my thoughts and the decision I came to. Spoiler Alert: I switched to a paid host!

Starting Out For Free

When I first decided to start my blog back in 2019, I didn’t know what to expect. I started as much as to have an online diary. Somewhere I could muse about running without boring my friends and family. What I did know is I didn’t really want to pay for it. There were multiple options for starting a blog out there: blogger, wordpress.com etc. but in the end I settled on using the wordpress.org self-served option. My main reason for this over the free wordpress.com version is it would give me a lot more control over the look and feel of the site. Otherwise though there was little to choose. That said, I still didn’t want to pay for anything.

Historically I have run a couple of websites and knew of a couple of free hosting providers. Therefore I went to one of those and in the early days of my blog I was on free hosting and I was happy with it.

The thing with free hosting is that the cost of running your site will not be free for the provider. They will still have their servers to run, staff to pay etc. so they need ways of making money in other ways. The first is that they may add ads to your site, but you don’t get the revenue. The other is that they will limit your site so as soon as you have any demand, you will need to pay.

Back then though this wasn’t an issue and I was happy bobbing along on my free hosting plan.

Changing Providers

Unfortunately a couple of years ago the free host I was using started to charge. As mentioned, they aren’t giving free hosting out of the goodness of their hearts so I had an option, start paying or find another free host. I still didn’t want to pay so after dabbling around I found another free host and switched my site over. To anyone visiting there would have been zero visible change.

From an early stage I realised this new free host was not as good as my previous host but I decided I would just learn to live with it.

The first issue that I had was that this new host wouldn’t allow XML-RPC. Now if you Google this you’ll find a lot of people who may recommend you disable this yourself. However, if you are using WordPress’ own Jetpack app, it needs to be available. I’d loved using Jetpack as it allowed me to blog on the go (actually as I have been writing this very post) but now I had to go via the web instead. It was an inconvenience but – I still didn’t want to have to pay.

As mentioned above, one thing free hosting will sometimes do is limit your site. This was the second issue I started to face. Obviously they don’t want all of their resources being used by someone who is paying nothing and want to encourage you to switch to a paid plan. However, occasionally I would get an email telling me I’d used all my resource for the day. This was annoying as it never seemed to tally with a surge in visitors and would lead to a 24hr suspension of my site. I tried removing various plugins but it was a cost of being free – I still didn’t want to have to pay.

Then earlier this year I noticed that Google was struggling to read my sitemaps. These help tell them what pages are on the site. At the same time I noticed that new blogs weren’t showing on my feed reader. Getting people to subscribe to my RSS feed is a great way of pushing content out. After a lot of digging I found the issue for both problems. My web host was adding a small snippet of code to every page that it served. I’m not 100% sure what it was for, they said something about crawlers, but it was preventing any XML file being rendered correctly and breaking these aspects of my site. I was starting to get frustrated at the various limitations but – I still didn’t want to have to pay.

The Final Straw

When I first started this blog, as I said above, it was as much an online diary. However, much like the famous proverbs around trees in forests making sound:

If you write a blog post and no-one reads it, does it really exist?

Just like the dopamine hit if someone likes your post on social media, knowing someone is reading your words gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling deep down. Getting the occasional hit on some of my parkrun tourism reviews would feel good but usually the volumes kept me well below the rate limits mentioned above. Then came my piece on the London Marathon Ballot.

I’d written my post “How to Make the London Marathon Ballot Fairer” back in May and it had had a handful of reads. Then on 19th June the ballot results were released. Suddenly everyone was searching on Google for terms like “London marathon ballot” and “London Marathon Ballot Odds” and my site was ranking really well, sending traffic to my site. I’d never had so many visits but then I hit the rate limit, was put in the naughty corner and the site was suspended for 24hrs. All of a sudden all these potential future readers of my blog were being directed elsewhere and Google punished me as I fell down the results across the board. Now had the volumes been obscenely high I’d have accepted it. But in fact my “many visits” topped out at just 226 users before I got slapped with the ban. This really made me sit up and take notice at how restricted my site was. Finally I accepted I needed to pay for hosting.

Paid Hosting

Having made the decision to pay for hosting I did a lot of searching for the best deal for me. Eventually settling on an offer that will cost me just under £5 a month. I’d have preferred to spend less but as alluded to earlier, you do get what you pay for. However, the changes that I have been able to enact already have made my life easier.

• Immediately I was able to start to use Jetpack again to manage my posts. Being able to work easily from my phone is a big plus
• My RSS feed started working again and the latest post was pushed out to people’s readers. I was no longer screaming in to the void
• Google could see my sitemaps again
• An SEO tool I was using suddenly was able to scrape properly and flagged a myriad of issues that fixing will help my site. I was completely unaware
• I was able to start serving ads. This is a decision I debated in my mind. I don’t want my site to become a massive billboard but at the same time, if I can offset any of the costs it will help.

So Should I Use Free Hosting for my Blog?

To read the final paragraph and you’d think the answer is a simple NO. However, it’s not quite that simple. Free Hosting definitely has a time and a place. When I was starting out it gave me the opportunity to see if the blog was something I could commit to or not. I have over time tried 2 or 3 other blog ideas but shelves then after a short while. I wouldn’t have done this with paid hosting.

That said, I think it is an unfortunate truth that if you want to have a blog people will visit, there is no way round it you will need to pay. Maybe this is all vanity that I want my voice to be heard and for that I need to pay but at the moment I’m glad that I finally took the leap!