Use Google Sites as your Free Web Host

Many times it makes sense to go for a free hosting account rather than spend everything on a paid hosting solution. For example, if you are requirement is that of a simple but professional website on which you do not want to spend much. Or when you just want a temporary site. Or what you are looking is just a plain site to show pictures of your pets.

In all these cases the sites do not require a thousands of MBs as space. For most of your needs 10-12 MB is good enough unless you have lot of PDFs and Videos. As for the bandwidth (there is no problem if you do not understand these terms) also they do not require more than 2 or 3 GBs.

You search on internet and you will find many of the web hosting guys (read sharks) who want to sell the hosting plans. (This may sometime include me also). They will always lead you to buy the most expensive plan they have on some pretext or other. Some will say - "hey you need that bandwidth - go for premium plan" or "Our assisment shows that you need a virtual private server". But remember for a small requirement like this you don’t have to go for them. If you have Google Apps just stick to making a professional website using Google Sites. Contrary to popular belief that Google sites does not have good look and feel or thay have very "templated" look -well if you customize it well and use the images smartly - the site can be very professional. You can try suing the Google Sites. And then if you need - you can always upgrade later on. If you feel Google sites is not good enough, then move on. Anyway here are some advantages and disadvantages who want to evaluate Google Sites.

Advantages:

• Google sites has the WYSWIG editors (even year computer savvy child can use it to create a site). Can be used easily by even someone who doesn’t know a thing about HTML. In fact many schools in USA have students using Google sites very regularly.
  
• No software need to be installed - this is one factor that separates, Google Sites from other free web designing sites. There is absolutely no need of web page development software like dreamweaver or front page. There is no need to learn any software, no struggles with FTP and you got nothing to do with complex scripting.
• Making a website in Google Pages is as easy as blogging. If you have ever blogged using Blogger or Wordpress then you know enough.
• Things like creating a table is easy - all you need to do is to cut and paste from a word document.Or you can just create a new page of that type.
  
• Adding photos and attachments is as easy as uploading files is easy. By uploading files, you can easily help the reader to download, simply by clicking a link.
• Google Sites can be easily integrated to documents in Google Docs to present data.
• You can create site for your business domain. So your site appears when you typr your business domain name. If you use masked forwarding then the site visitor may not know that the site is created using Google Apps.
  

Disadvantage:

• It has links to Google Sites (so people will know that you have crated it using Google sites (what is they know?)
• Limitations like fixed templates, fixed site structure and no scripting are allowed
• You don’t have many choices when building the site. There are only a 15-20 of templates provided. You cannot use other templates from other free template sites, or make one using frontage.
• The only way to increase page size is to go vertical. It is also difficult to place links horizontally.
• Google Pages does not allow you to edit HTML of a whole Page, you can edit just sections of it.

I recommend readers of this blog to share their Google sites.