Is there a penalty for using free hosts?

[Jakpot]

Is Google penalizing web sites that are hosted by Tripod, Angelfire, Hypermart, etc?
I am a really small player and use these hosts to do affiliate web pages to supplement my retirement income.

[rfgdxm1]

Maybe. The problem with this idea is that penalizing sites on free hosts could wreak havoc with SERPs that would naturally tend to pull up relevant amateur sites that tend to use free hosts. Thus, doing this would be problematic unless the Google algo can with high accuracy identify commercial sites on free hosts.

[MrSpeed]

Any sites of mine on a free host rank just fine. They are just "hobby" sites.

Hosting is so cheap. It is just plain foolish to host affiliate sites on a free host. It is more than likely agianst the TOS and your site can deleted no questions asked. I had some sites deleted because I was just linking to some "money" sites.

[AlexK]

On certain searches an old free-host site of mine currently ranks *way* above my .com. So no, there appears to be no penalty from Google for being on a free host.

[BigDave]

I doubt that there is a penalty placed by Google, but there are a lot of people that just won't link to you, and quite a few people that will not go to any of those sites for various reasons.

[Kangol]

I cannot say for sure that Google is penalizing free hosted sites. But I would not start a new site an a free host. Lots of people abused free hosts by spamming heavily. I notices sites on fee hosts that passed the sandbox due to the age of the domain. Spammers took advantage of this and now Google may look suspicious to free hosted sites.

[JerryOdom]

the only real penalty is if you want to develop link relations with other webmasters. Google probably does look upon them with suspicion do to spammers.

[g1smd]

An informational hobby site on a free host ranks at #2 in 42 million or as #4 in 64 million results depending on which Google datacentre you look at at the time. For that sort of site, the domain does not matter.

[Jakpot]

Thanks All. Does anyone know of a paid host with
a simple editor similiar to the free hosts?

[g1smd]

Those simple editors are very time consuming I find.

Have you tried the basic editor that comes with the Mozilla web browser, combined with a basic FTP program to upload the files from your machine to your host? That is a very efficient way of working, allows you to develop offline, and ensures that you have kept a copy of your site on your own machine should the hosting suddenly disappear.

[Jakpot]

Sorry, I wrote the wrong thing.
I meant to ask about a paid host with
a File Manager similiar to Tripod.
Thanks