At this point, construction of your home page should be almost complete, (if you’ve put a few hours work in to it), but your page still resides on your computer, not on the internet…
If you log on to the internet, however, you should be able to test all your links to external web sites that you have built into your web site. If you’re using a MS Front page software you can test the web page online to see how it will look without actually uploading it to a web hosting server. If all looks good and you want to take the big step… you’re now ready to publish your page on the world wide web. To do this, you will need to copy (upload or publish) your page and all graphic and music files which your page uses from your computer’s hard drive to a web server that is connected to the global network that we call the internet. This is most commonly referred to as “Hosting”.
There are a number of companies around the world that will give you Hosting server space at no charge. You will, however, be required to include banners or icons on your pages to promote their free hosting service and their sponsors. In many cases with a “Free Host” you will end up with banners and ads from the web sites of your competition being placed on your pages. You will not be able to regulate content of those ads, which could lead to some embarrassing advertisements being seen by your visitors.
Another reason that we never suggest the use of “Free Hosts” is because your web site will become just a secondary web page located within the Free Host’s web site. Secondary pages are not recognized by all search engines and many free hosting services such as Homestead have even been banned from being listed with major search engines.