If you are looking at setting up a website then The pros of free are obviosly the cost. The Cons are that you hardly get customer support and the site is liekly to go down a lot. The cons of paid hosting are cost of course and the pros are your site is up 99.9% of the time, you get decent customer support and more options for your site:

I suggest you have a look at http://www.hosting24.com they will register a domain name for free for life and come with unlimited webspace and unlimited data transfer and you can go with them on a monthly basis.

Also when you sign up with them if you enter in a discount code they will give you 25% off their ridiculously cheap hosting plans. code to use is 25OFF

I host all my sites there and have been more than pleased with their help and support which is available by phone support! I hope this helps

Take a look at http://www.webhostingtalk.com and look in the Dedicated Hosting section. It's a VERY active forum and I'm sure you'll find your answer just by searching!

If you're only storing and retrieving very small files and you need to do it from many remote locations, hosted is a good option. If you're mostly working from one location and use the server any more than a little bit, a local server is your best bet.

Hope this helps, and feel free to check out http://www.inovagent.com/file_servers for more information on local file servers.

http://www.lunarpages.com/id/webhostinglunarpages

It's faster, more secure, and a lot better supported since majority of websites use it, and pretty much all web hosting companies offer it.

I recommend one of these http://www.webhostingtable.com

Fatcow has the best offer right now.
Their standard price is $88/year
but they have the 50% sale right now.

Disk space: Unlimited
Bandwidth: Unlimited
A Free domain name
Unlimited domains and subdomains

Price: $44/year

They're one of the oldest hosting companies, founded 1998, they're also one of the largest, currently hosting about 500,000 websites.
Their hosting plan includes a web builder, so you can create your site just by drag and drop (without any programming), or you could install Wordpress (easy, one click install from their control panel), choose a theme that you like, and start adding content.

Management likes Windows servers because they think that the graphical user interface will lower the cost of administrators, but total cost of ownership is greater for Windows servers (greater hardware requirements, less MTTF).

I had heavily used NetWare servers that would run without rebooting for 11 months, yet Windows NT4 nd 2000 servers that were less lightly loaded needed to be rebooted every week or two, or their processes would die or slow due to memory leaks. NetWare and Unix servers, though tricky to set up and tune, would run and run without attention.

Unix servers can execute PHP, which is a powerful server side scripting language. Windows web servers can't run PHP.

If you're only storing and retrieving very small files and you need to do it from many remote locations, hosted is a good option. If you're mostly working from one location and use the server any more than a little bit, a local server is your best bet.

Hope this helps, and feel free to check out http://www.inovagent.com/file_servers for more information on local file servers.

Hostmonster http://www.hostmonster.com/track/ryukenden/

They offer hosting of "unlimited domains" and you will get massive webspace of 300000 MB (300 GB ). They only charge $5.95/month and they offer "a free Domain Name" and installing service called "Fantastico". By using Fantastico, you could create own forum, photo gallery, shopping cart (e-commerce),your own auction site and your own blogs within few seconds. They also offer "Free Website Builder" as well.
Visit the site to check details.

Hostmonster http://www.hostmonster.com/track/ryukenden/

More hosting visit
http://www.nicewebhosts.com

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