In the world of the Internet, you can sometimes make a major difference in the look and feel of your site for a very small amount of money by moving from a free service to a paid service. See how cheap vs. free plays out in several different scenarios in this article.

Web Hosting

Depending on the web host you choose, upgrading from a free to a cheap service can lead to many types of changes. In many cases, web hosts treat you as if moving from free to cheap was taking a step through an important door. Once inside, you're greeted by a host of enticements to not only try to get you to stay, but also to—if not now, they eventually—upgrade again . . . and again.

Here is a list of some typical advantages that come with inexpensive web hosting as opposed to free services:

• More storage space, sometimes taking you from the realm of megabytes (MB) to the realm of gigabytes (GB)
• More bandwidth, possibly unlimited bandwidth
• More, possibly unlimited, email accounts
• Access to a database
• Removal of banner and/or pop-up ads from your site
• Support for PHP, CGI, and Perl scripting
• Removal of banner and/or pop-up ads from your site
• Support for PHP, CGI, and Perl scripting
• Access to Secure SSL support
• A unique domain name as opposed to having a subdomain on the web host's domain
• Credits for Google Adwords, FaceBood Ad, Microsoft adCenter, etc.
• Email forwarding service
• A greater website page allowance (some free sites limit the number of pages)
• Free search-engine submission
• Backup capabilities
• Blogging and/or podcasting tools
• Account performance guarantee
• Marketing tools
• Site statistics
• Web traffic reporting
• Spam filtering
• Multiple database hosting capabilities

Online File Hosting

When looking at file hosting (including image files), there are some similar and some different options that one gets in a cheap, as opposed to a free, package:

• Increase in file size limit (possibly in GB, rather than MB)
• Increase in storage space
• Removal of ads, such as banner ads, from your interface
• Advanced statistics
• Priority support opportunities, for example, live chat
• Secure, redundant backup of stored files
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption
• Website Uploader
• Direct Linking/Hot Linking to files from a variety of places, including websites, email, and instant message (IM) environments
• Web file manager to make file organization and searching easier
• Widgets to allow file publication to different locations.

Blog Hosting

The difference between free and cheap in the world of blogs often begins (and sometimes ends) with the difference between a blog hosted on a subdomain and a blog that has its own domain name. For example:

• With a Blogger blog, you can pay to register a domain name and attach your domain name to your blog (rather than using a blogspot.com subdomain).
• With a Wordpress.com blog, you can do the same, or map a previously acquired domain name to your blog (also for a fee).

Wordpress.com stands out from some other blogs in having a wider variety of upgrade possibilities. In addition, at Wordpress.com, you can:

• purchase an addition 5, 15, or 25 gigabytes (GB) of webspace to add to the 3 GB you get for free.
• add the option to use cascading style sheets (CSS) to design your own theme.
• upgrade to avoid any free ads which wordpress.com, by the license terms, is allowed to place on your free blog.
• unlock the top end of the user limit: you can have 35 users with the free private blog, but if you need more, you can purchase that ability.