What are the 10 Major Constraints in Hosting Free Wordpress?

People who are just starting with WordPress may think free hosting is great because it is, for that matter, absolutely free. But some limitations can influence your decision. In WordPress, there are two types of unpaid hosting. One is called 'freemium' which is a $0 tier that initially draws the users, but as soon as they hit the limitations, they need to do unpaid removal of them before using it again. The other model is basically ad-supported, where the website is there just to insert advertisements and they are treated as the most important customers. So what are the limitations and how can you overcome them? Let's find that out. 

No business can operate smoothly and see success without offering its clients unlimited disk space or storage, bandwidth, and other resources. Free hosting on WordPress provides low storage along with other site limits such as low bandwidth. If you need more of these services, you would have to pay extra or you might be charged with a penalty. The charge is required to upgrade the free service to a paid one, and if you do not do that fast enough, it might end up cutting you off entirely. On top of that, the nudges that will come on the screen saying "upgrade now" are often overpriced and always annoying. 

Sometimes while using the site, it may run slow or you may face problems with SSL or DNS. This might cause you to need some customer help, but often you would be left with an expectation that you would figure it out yourself. The site, if free hosting, will sometimes exclude access to support, or it will take days to get your questions answered or pay low priority to all your requirements. 

When a bug or any security defect is found on your system, or something is discovered that has affected your PHP, database, or operating system, it is up to the provider to fix the issue. The provider in this case is WordPress which has many paying customers that need technical assistance or supervision. So you can imagine where the non-paying customers come in the list of priorities. So asking for technical assistance, or a server that is professionally maintained is not really the case when it comes to free WordPress hosting. 

The free WordPress hosting providers often do not have the whole country of New Zealand on their maps. So if you are from the country of New Zealand, your website will be hosted in another country. This can be particularly hard to work at a place that is far away from your local audience. This also takes a long time to load the data as it travels way far. In addition to that, time zones can create difficulty. 

Several free hosting providers on WordPress provide you with free hosting plans that will only let you use a subdomain, instead of your own domain name, or web address. This poses quite a difficulty, especially when you are trying to build a brand around your website. Because building it with a subdomain is a much harder job to do. In addition, working with a subdomain instead of your own domain name makes you look unprofessional.

Often providers of free WordPress hosting show advertisements of other websites on your website to earn revenue for themselves. You, as a free user, will have no say in which advertisements will appear or where they will be placed. It is equally irritating and annoying for both of you and your audience. It is also distracting for your views from your website's professional appearance. What could be the worst part of this? Well, your industry competitors might be paying to show and advertise their products on your website, leaving you behind in the market competitiveness. 

On WordPress, many of these free hosting services often turn out to be limited trial sessions, which after a while you will be encouraged to pay for. This cost will be much higher than the original and standard WordPress hosting fees. When you are entering for a free hosting session, but the provider is asking for your credit card information, be very cautious. Some companies will automatically renew this subscription after the trial period ends, and sometimes without even notifying you beforehand. So make sure you read the fine print entirely before signing up for any free hosting sessions. There is nothing wrong with free promotion, but when the actual price is hidden, it may cause very unpleasant surprises. 

Free WordPress hosts often provide tools and interfaces that are incredibly challenging. In addition to this poor condition of usage, the documentation is also flawed and impaired. This will make it difficult to figure out how you should do things. So you might end up giving a lot of time to understand and properly function. You will have to spend a huge time trying to understand how the tools work and use the already available features. On top of that, these tools and interfaces are often not the industry standard. 

Sometimes, the free WordPress hosts use older versions of PHP which can cause you a hefty amount of problems. Using an older version of PHP is related to problems like compatibility with WordPress, security issues, and speed of the site. The older version of PHP is not as fast as the new version. The older versions often end up not being compatible with the newer version of WordPress, creating a lot of user difficulty. Older PHP versions are also less secure than the new ones, which puts the websites at a lot of security threats, such as the probability of the website being hacked, or its data being compromised.  

Free hosting does not allow you to connect with your email. This can cause a number of problems for companies who are trying to build a new brand. The free hosting service does not allow adding an email address which makes it difficult to match the email address with the website address. If this is not the case, if the host allows creating email addresses and gives access to mailboxes, there are no security checks. The host will allow anyone to create emails that attract email spammers. This can lead to the host being labeled as a source of spam by Gmail and when that happens, the emails that you send have a better chance of ending up in spam boxes, rather than inboxes. 

Even though WordPress hosting can be free, these are the reasons why it is always advised to go for the paid ones.