How free is the “free” website creation?

Since the dawn of Internet its users wanted to have their share of making their voice heard. Internet provided and still (even more now) provides the ability for reaching a mass audience. This wish was fulfilled by a number of ways throughout the years with technologies and services for all pockets and technical abilities. As a service provider though in order to go mass it meant to go free. Many free web hosting providers mushroomed, many free “make your own page” services appeared. Some were good some were bad, most of them were kitsch.

Today we are blessed with the ability to have a variety of technologies and services that enable us to express our opinion online without having to put our hands too deep in the pocket. Blogging platforms, social networking services, free hosts all play their distinct role in the digital economy chain. Defining free though is hard in terms of money and customization ability. You may use free to tools to build a website and then pay 5 dollars per month to host it somewhere. You may use a free blogging platform and still pay 10 dollars a year for your own domain. You may even a buy cool easy to use tool to build everything and host your site on a free host. Free is what suits you to be free. You may build, host and advertise your site totally for free though...but that comes at a cost as well....the irony.

I dislike free hosting services, they usually place their own ads on your site, worst yet, they are unreliable and you may end up loosing everything. I do not really like blogs that are myblog.arandombloggingplatform.com. Domain name is long, it is not easy to remember and it just looks scrapy. Tools from the other hand are a totally different story. There are many great tools and technologies for building and managing your site that are free to use. Social networking services...well I am not a big fan, but a great deal of people like them. You cannot do a lot out there and most end up with having the most kitsch page on the web (you can call me myspace). On the other hand there are more formalized webpage social networking services like squidoo but some might not like the absence of creative freedom.

If you want to go totally free there are solutions out there, but why do that? The outcome will be far worse than with just paying 10 dollars a year for a blog domain or 3-5 dollars per month if you are hosting everything. As always you have to see what you want to build and then decide on the technology and the platform and calculate the costs. It may not be totally free but it will not be expensive either.