Question about web hosting

[Frank1]

I've had a personal website for a few years. I had it at a free hosting site, but have had to pay a yearly fee for a domain name. Since I had very little traffic, I decided that it was not worth the price I had to pay even though the price was not very expensive. I have been doing some searching and found that there are free hosting sites that will also give you a free domain name. Some claim that they do not put any advertising on the page. My question is, if everything is free, why do they offer them? Is there some sort of a catch. Would appreciate any information anyone may have. Thanks. Frank

 

[Alejandro85]

Often those hosting services do not offer you a domain (like Affordable, easy to use Website builders) but a sub-domain of theirs instead (like www.yourweb.yourhosting.com), or maybe some regional top level domain (for example, all .com.ar are free). Often, those domains work the very same as a normal one, but many times get lower rating on search engines that typically give preference to .com domains.

But why do they offer all for free? Don't know for sure and since I don't do web development don't know the topic deeply, but some hostings have both free and paid services, with limitations make a paid subscription tempting, or just as an advertisement way to show others their services.

 

[Frank1]

Thank you for your reply. I'll take a look at some of those.