What exactly is free hosting? In exchange for free hosting, company can place ads your website. The ads can be placed on top of main page, top of every page, or on sides. The ads are usually not targeted. It is possible that they won’t match demographics of your web visitors. In addition, they are not customized to match content on your web page.

This is a very expensive exchange program if your goal is to build up an online business. The area above fold, everything that is visible without scrolling, is most effective advertising area on entire site. This is area you should use for your affiliate links, Google Adsense, paid links and expanded site navigation.

Some free web hosting contracts go a step further and ask for your participation in their email marketing campaigns. You will receive emails that require a click through to a merchant site, and/or fill out endless surveys. This can be very time consuming and annoying.

Before you sign any free hosting contract ask to see sample sites. You want to get a feel for types of ads that are being shown on other website. What do you want to look for? 1.Do you see pop-up ads? What about banners? 2.How large are ads? 3.Are they just off topic or are they inappropriate? 4.Where are ads? Are they on every single page or on selected pages?

Even if ads are not on every page, watch out. It could mean that hosting service has figured out which pages bring in most revenue and they can afford to ignore everything else. Guess what? If it brings in lots of revenue for them, it could probably bring in lots of revenue for you.

There’s free and then there’s FREE If space is free, what about domain name? If your new site will look like http://yoursite.freewebhost.com you’re getting a subdomain for your site. It’s not really your unique domain name. They are simply loaning you a space for your stuff.

This is not a unique domain name that you can use to brand your business. You can’t use it anywhere except with this particular web hosting company. Ditto if new domain names is http://www.freewebhost.com/yoursite/.

In real world, businesses come in every size, from self-employed entrepreneurs like me to mega malls like Wal-Mart.

On Internet, companies come in every size, too, from a stand-alone ebook sales page with webmaster and owner all in one, to 300 pound gorilla like Amazon, with over a million pages requiring entire population of a small country to serve as webmaster.

If your site is a single page, it is its own network. But if your site is any bigger, and you have plans to grow, it is a network or is fast becoming one. You need network monitoring.

Most ecommerce webmasters are at least somewhat familiar with website monitoring. Many use a website monitoring service or software to keep track of "uptime" and "downtime".

At your local shopping mall, serious business requires more than just knowing when front doors are open and when they are closed. Serious ecommerce needs to know more than just when site is accessible. That is what network monitoring is all about.

Chances are, your e-business owns one of following, or uses one of following remotely:

DNS servers: These are used to translate your site name, like www.mycompany.com, to numbers called "IP addresses" that computers understand. If DNS servers are not working properly, end-users will not be able to find your site and will get an error. Usually only an external or remote monitoring service will detect such a problem.

An FTP server: File Transfer Protocol servers are used to help you exchange files with remote users. If you use FTP, a monitoring service can make sure it is always up and running.