Top 5 Best Free Web Hosting Services in 2017
Don’t we all relish free stuff? Most of us do and in web hosting, that’s a much-welcomed idea. Free web hosting is available and should be a welcome relief to many, particularly those who can’t put up with all the costs that come with setting up a website and keeping it running.
Free hosting providers give you free web space on their servers to keep your website’s files plus a couple of other web hosting features you need to set up your website and keep it running well. Of course there are limitations mostly when it comes to speed, server space, backups and uptime guarantees.
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Some hosts will give you just the minimum hosting features you need to set up a personal website, while others will offer you a set of features just enough to let you set up a website for your small or medium business.
Always be on the lookout for forced ads. After all, no one wants to see their website plastered with all kinds of ads on every empty space.
Below, we take a detailed look at some of the leading free hosting companies.
Hosting company | storage space | bandwidth | cpanel | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
000webhost | 1.5 GB | 100GB | Yes | |
5GB Free | 5GB | 20GB | Yes | |
Freehostia | 250MB | 6GB | No | |
FreeHostingEU | 200MB | 4GB | No | |
Byet.host | 1GB | 50GB | Yes |
000webhost
000webhost is almost a decade old and over the years, they have offered top free web hosting services to roughly 14 million websites. Ever since they started, their free hosting services have been ad free and rich with features that make it possible to easily trust them when it comes to both small as well as medium projects.
Very little limits have been put on the essential website building and management features. Here’s what to what expect:
- 5 GB storage space
- 100 GB of bandwidth
- Unlimited domains and subdomains
- Up to 5 email accounts
- cPanel
- Two MySQL databases
- FTP Accounts
On top of all these, they guarantee users 99.9% uptime and weekly backups as well. Other minor features include SEO management and analysis tools, website traffic stats, and a couple of guides to help you refine your projects. Recently, they started to power their plans with a new cloud-based infrastructure and that means your files are secure, thanks to the SSL certificates.
If you are just new to web hosting and need hand-holding to figure out how things are done, then 000webhost will be a great place for you to get a good start. For the veterans, this plan could be beneficial in a number of ways. Since they give enough support for small and medium projects, you can set up your website here and then scale it to premium plans once it starts to experience growth.
If you wish, you can go for their upgraded plans later which cost about $3.50/month.
5GB Free
Just as the name suggests, users get to enjoy free space worth 5GB when they choose to go with 5GB free hosting. Much of the company’s focus has been on security and cutting-edge technology and it’s for this reasons that they shifted to a more advanced data center and also started to use CloudLinux operating system.
In 2014, they stopped ads on their free accounts. So what should one expect?
- 5GB disk space
- 20GB of bandwidth
- Domain hosting
- FTP account
- MySQL databases
- The Gist
But that’s not all. There’s also the one add on domain plus 3 sub-domains for your single account. Each of them serves different purposes. Add on domains enable one to include one more website to their hosting account. A parked domain will only point straight to the home directory attached to your main domain. In short, a parked domain will still open the same website as the main domain.
Not forgetting to mention the cPanel. We all know it as the most commonly used control panel for web hosting. Many web hosting services limit the feature to premium packages but 5GB gives it to you for free. Also important to mention is the CMS installer which includes all the popular scripts you know from WordPress to Drupal to Joomla to PHP-Nuke, Opencart, and many others.
Freehostia
Freehostia has been around for about 10 years and much as they are focused on offering paid hosting, they also rank among the best free web hosting sites. Much of their reputation stems from their stable and reliable hosting services and this extends to the free hosting plan as well.
All of their plans have been assigned lovely names. There’s the Chocolate Flavor, Lovebeat, Supernatural, and Wildhoney. Chocolate Flavor refers to the free plan and here’s what to expect from it:
- 6GB of bandwidth
- 250MB disk space
- No Ads
- Elefante Panel
- MySQL databases and PHP compatibility
- Domain hosting
- 3POP/IMAP accounts.
Unlike the two free web hosts we’ve looked at, Freehostia surprisingly offers you 24/7 support. Best of all, the response time is within an hour. For a free hosting account, that’s such a big deal. And using the Elefante installer, you will have it easy installing any scripts from WordPress to PHP to phpBB and on top of that, you have an option to easily upgrade to the next plan by means of just a single click. This is in case your website outgrows the free hosting plan.
So, much as their disk space might be relatively small, on the flip side, there’s the 24/7 customer support which balances this out so well and has actually earned them considerable praise in many best free web hosting reviews.
FreeHostingEU
FreeHostingEU has been in existence for quite a few years and over this period, they have earned a solid reputation for their reliable services. The service itself is a joint project. AttractSoft GmbH and FreeDomain.co.nr come together to set it up. No doubt Germans have always been ahead of the pack in web hosting across Europe and FreeHostingEU easily qualifies as the best free website host in their region.
Under their hosting plans, they have two paid hosting plans and one that is free. Our main focus, of course, is the free one which comes included with:
- 4GB of bandwidth
- 200MB of disk space
- Proprietary cPanel
- MySQL databases
- FTP accounts
- One Email Account
- Domain hosting
Also included are free domains: .eu,pn / me.pn. Unless you stay within Europe, these may be of little use to you. But to those within Europe, this is a nice feature. You might as well purchase from them premium domains or even add to your free hosting account an already registered domain. If you happen to be a user of Joomla or WordPress, the 1-click installation will take care of your needs and on top of that, it supports various languages including, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Flash, and CGI.
The featured control panel is user-friendly and easy to use. A demo of the same is also available even before you sign up for an account.
Byet.host
Byet.host is an Ohio-based independently owned hosting provider. Other than their shared, VPS and dedicated hosting, they also offer free shared hosting as well as free reseller hosting. With over 1 million websites hosted to date, there’s no doubt they are among the most powerful free hosting providers in the world.
For the free hosting services, users should expect:
- 50GB of bandwidth
- 1GB storage space
- A cPanel
- 5 MySQL databases
- FTP account
- Domain hosting
- 5 email accounts
- No Ads
Reliability is enhanced by the fact that on their platform, they have numerous redundancy protection systems such as the load balancing hardware, the backup system, a huge Storage Area Network (SAN), power protection, amongst other systems. A quick look at free website hosting reviews also shows many users are pretty impressed by the host’s performance.
Another great thing about them is the cPanel. We already mentioned that this is the started control panel for managing websites but very few free hosting providers share the pride of having it on their free hosting plan. With it, you can configure, edit and manage subdomains, emails, website databases and so much more. Not forgetting to mention the free reseller hosting plan. If you wish to start you own mini web hosting business, this plan is will serve you right. Best of all, it’s free.
Conclusion
Free hosting is a great opportunity that fits many purposes. You could be testing out your business or looking for an easy and hassle-free way to own a website. There are dozens of reasons that could lead you to want to go for free hosting. Now it’s up to you to find which of these free hosting services suits you best.
Each of the free hosting providers we’ve mentioned offers a different set of features. Some offer plenty of them while others just a few. If you just need a simple personal website with a few web pages, then the plans with simple features will suit you best. All of us need a personal website and here’s a video telling why:
However, if you aim to undertake a small or medium project, then those with plenty of features will likely work well for you.
At some point along the way, your website may grow and require some scaling and at this point you will again have many options to choose from. The all time, most recommended hosting provider when you want to scale your website is Hostgator. It’s not just due to their reputation but also feature-rich and solid hosting plans that fit well with almost any kind of hosting need.
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