The web hosting company who provides you with free web hosting services often makes their money from the ads. They strategically place these ads in your website, either at the top or at the bottom of your website. In this way, if by any chance someone is visiting your website and clicking the ads, the web hosting company would make money from the click itself or from the purchased goods that been done by the visitors.

Free web hosting services usually have more limited features if you compare it with the other premium plans. The web hosting company probably will give you about 5MB – 100MB disk space to begin with. You could take advantage of this offer by building your website and sell some products or services, and eventually purchase the premium plan to access more features and benefits. Some of them are a bigger disk space and bandwidth, free website templates, able to manage your database, additional scripts, and so on.

The domain name that you’ll get for this free web hosting service is the subdomain. For example, if the web hosting company has a domain name called www.myhosting.com, yours will be yourname.myhosting.com. If you have some cash to start, you could invest it by building your own domain name, and linked it to your website that you host in this free web hosting.

There are so many advantages and disadvantages for this free web hosting service. The advantages are you could start building your website without spending any money, you’ll get your own subdomain name, and you could manage your own website. The disadvantages are, your website will be penetrated by the web hosting company ads, usually you’ll get no database and no multiple email accounts, and sometimes you can’t included the modules like PHP, DHTML, and Flash in your website.

Even though there are several advantages and disadvantages of this free web hosting services, you could use this service to build your own website, and work your way out to purchase a bigger plan.

Whether you have a simple website or a complex one, any data that you input into your website will store in a database. To do the changes in your database such ass add, edit, delete or process your database, you need a database management system. MySQL is one of the best database management systems that you can use for your website.

MYSQL also has the ability to create a relational database management. It means that you could input the data, and then put it in the several tables at once. This will make your database organizing more structured than putting it all in a large tables.

Using MySQL database doesn’t always require you to have remote servers. You could also install it in your own PC to build any applications that you have in mind. To interact with various databases that you have, you could use commands from PHP script.

There are several things you need to consider before you choose the web hosting plan with MySQL in it. It’s not just as simple as picking the web hosting plan that has the biggest bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, or addon domains. It’s much more than that. Here are several points that you should have in your web hosting plan in order to run this MySQL database successfully:

1. Database

Figure out how many databases that you want to have for your website. A web hosting provider usually limits the MySQL database amounts according to the web hosting plan that you purchased. MySQL web hosting usually allows you to have multiple websites and more than 5 MySQL databases.

2. Interface

Because you’ll be working with your database frequently, you need a web hosting plan that designed specially for admin interface. It should be easier for you to manage your database in MySQL using the interface they provided. If you’re working on a team, you probably need to create multiple user ID’s. It’s to make sure that only specific person could access specific data. You could choose the web hosting provider that using CPanel because it has a good user interface and dashboard.

3. CRON Support

A cron will helps you to run some scripts regularly and automatically. By using this, you could set up when you want to run the scripts for your website. CPanel has the option for crons that you could take advantage of.

4. PHP

As you probably know, MySQL is the closest friend of PHP. You need to check out for the MySQL web hosting providers that could give you PHP extensions. Before you subscribe to any of the MySQL web hosting plans, you need to figure out the capabilities of that web hosting in managing your databases and PHP. If you failed to do so, you could be very disappointed with it in the future.

When you have intent to run MySQL databases in your website, it’s better for you to choose web hosting providers that offers a complete solution rather than just a usual web hosting that offer pure basic function.