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No offense taken I get what you are saying.
I certainly realise that having a website isn't going to "magically" generate traffic, even if I do get hits I know that just because someone visits doesn't necessarily mean they will even have any interest.
Afaik those free hosts that I mentioned allow one to set up a fully customised site (you don't need to use templates), they don't have advertising, they have "gauranteed" uptime of > 90%. Sure as it's free you may think you can't hold them to that, but they also offer paid solutions which is where they get the money to offer the free stuff, in the hope that you will upgrade to a paid solution. Afaik your free site is hosted on the same severs as the paid ones so you should be getting the same service levels as if you were paying them.
Anyway this is all just some research for the future, to me a website is a mid-long term thing and not all that necessary right now, because I know it's not guaranteed to help me at all, though an online presense is good.
I have some other questions if anyone can advise me. I've seen that you can get "private" registrations for some domains, so your personal info doesn't show up on the whois database. Now I like the idea of privacy but does anyone think that having a private registration would look suspect to potential customers. I mean the average person probably doesn't know what the whois databse is or does, but the way people are on the net someone could plaster it all over the place (don't trust this company as they have a private registration blah blah blah).
Main thing I'm concerned about is the address info, do they require your physical address or just the postal address?
Most hosts wouldn't put paid customers on free hosting, unless it's really limited hosting without php, email etc. Reason for this is that if you give out free hosting you run the risk of spam being sent and scam sites being hosted. Which means your ips get blacklisted etc. The risk of this is way too great in free hosting. The hosts would generally do all they can to prevent paid hosting clients from being negatively affected by the free side.
Private registrations look very dodgy. If you're a legit business, why would you want to hide your identity or location?
Most of this type of information should be on your website anyways. Details like, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses etc.
Do registrars normally alert you when your domain is going to expire so that you won't lose it?