The internet is one of the world's top sources of information, products and just about anything else you could possibly want. And, if you have spent any amount of time online, you must have noticed that much of it is free.

Many home business entrepreneurs get their start online using some of these free resources. In fact, some of them use freebees almost exclusively.

So, just what are these valuable assets that attract so many home business newbies? Here are just a few:

1. Email - one can get free email accounts just about anywhere (MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Google GMail, Lycos) plus tons of others. Actually, free email accounts can be very useful, but that's another article.

2. Autoresponders - there are many free autoresponders (getresponse, and freeautobot, just to name a few). Some are better than others but they are a useful tool.

3. EBooks - You can get free ebooks just about anywhere. These can prove very valuable as giveaways to get people to do some sort of action,like join your mailing list.

4. Web Space - Free web space abounds throughout the internet. Most likely, the ISP you signed up with offers web space for free for you to put up your own personal web site. You can also get free space at places like Yahoo Geocities, Tripod, Bravenet, plus tons of others.

And the list goes on. However, today I would like to talk about Web Space. Free Or Not Free, It's Your Choice.

Many home business entrepreneurs, when first starting out, want to keep expenses to a minimum (I did this myself). Therefore, just after we join one or two affiliate programs and find out that we can't get the affiliate web page into the search engines (because there are probably 5 million affiliates with exactly the same page) we want to build our own site.

Having your own web site is probably one of the most important steps you can take to get your home business off to a fast start. Taking the time to find a good web host should be equally as important.

Read that last line again.

Why do I say that? Just think about this.

You have just spent the past two months learning html or how to use a program like FontPage to build your web site. You've been writing your web pages, putting in images and links to your affiliate web page and maybe even have made a few forms to get people to sign up for your own newsletter.

All is well and good so far, because it's still on your computer.

So now you go to find a place that will 'host' your site. And, being the money conscious person that you are, you look for some place free. Your internet service provider will give you probably 5 megs of space but will only let you put up a personal site.

So you decide to give another place a try. Bingo, you've found lots of places that will let you have space on their servers for free as long as they can put a banner ad on your web pages. A small price to pay you say and go ahead and sign up.

Great, now you have your own web site up and running, it's a little slow loading because of the banner ad but you decide that is OK. Now, in order to get your site closer to the top of your category in the search engines you decide to start doing link exchanges. Very good, it shows you have been doing your homework.

Now it's 4 or 5 months later and your site is on page 5 of the search results, people are joining your downline and signing up for your newsletter. What a wonderful thing this internet is.

One day you decide to log into your hosting account and change a few things on your site. But, what's up, you can't log in. You then decide to go to the search engine and type in the url of your site. Nothing! Error, the page you are looking for is not available!!!

Just like that, it's all gone. All your hard work, your only means of getting affiliate signups and newsletter opt-ins has disappeared. What's up you ask your web host and they tell you that they have changed their policy and no longer offer free web space. You're back to square one.

Think it can't happen? Think again. It happened to me.

That's right, all my web pages, articles, newsletter archives, classified ads, everything gone. And, to make things worse, I have been making changes to the site at the control panel of the web host and therefore didn't even have a recent copy of most of the pages on my computer. We live and learn!

Had I known all along how inexpensive it is to get good web hosting service I would never have gone the free route. To make a long story short, for less than $5.00 per month you can get excellent web hosting services.

I won't make that mistake again, will you?

Randy Justason