An advantage of free hosting is that it’s really simple to set up and maintain.

The hosting site will perform all the maintenance and upgrades for your site and you can basically sit back, create the content and relax. Most free hosting sites/CMS will offer you templates for free or to purchase which can make setting up your website a lot easy if you have little to no knowledge of web design and coding. You can usually tweak these templates a little but they’re sometimes restricted to what you can edit.

Cost – depending on where you go and how much you want to do yourself, self-hosting can be a better deal for you or can work out as a more expensive option

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Ownership – an advantage of self-hosting is that you completely own 100% of your content and everything on the website whereas some free hosting sites may have restrictions which is good to keep an eye on.

When self-hosting you have full control of what SEO techniques you want to implement and can keep on top of things and easily change whatever you want

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When self-hosting it’s good to apply an analytics system such as google analytics. When self-hosting you will be able to see a wider range of information with regards to your websites analytics.

With self-hosting you have a larger flexibility when it comes to customisation and if you know a bit of coding you can create your website from scratch without the use of templates.

Self-hosting is where you will pay to have your website on its own server. An advantage of self-hosting is that you are given more flexibility and management over your website. 

Disadvantages are that it’s quite tricky to set up if you don’t have all the tech-knowledge to begin with or the willingness to learn and in some cases it can be quite pricey. When self-hosting you own 100% of the rights to your website and have full customisation options available and can utilise SEO to its full potential much easier.