If you choose the free hosting route, be prepared for some common issues that come along with it.

Even the best free hosting tends to be fairly unstable, which can result in downtime. Also, providers typically place restrictions on storage and bandwidth, limiting your site’s growth and traffic capacity. Your website may also have slow performance.

There are times you may want to consider free hosting. For a personal project, it may be all you need. The same is true if you’re practicing your web design and development skills and just want a space to try out new ideas.

Perhaps you’re setting up an area to test new plugins or themes. In that case, the limitations of free hosting shouldn’t be a barrier to what you want to accomplish. Of course, if you simply need a staging site, you may want to use a local development tool such as Local and not worry about hosting at all.

However, if you need a live site and don’t want to deal with the drawbacks of free web hosting, there are some affordable alternatives to consider. A cheap host can help you keep your budget low while avoiding poor site availability.