The Best Free Web Hosting Options: An In-Depth Review

I've gone around clicking every single link for free web hosting I can find, then I created websites on all of them, and I even read the terms of service. Yes, I know, shocking. But I wanted to find if there are any hidden catches to these free web hosting plans. I found several truly free web hosting options that are worth using, each having different downsides.

1. FreeHosting.com: A Solid, No-Frills Option

Anyone is able to sign up here; you don't need to add a credit card or a payment method altogether, and your account gets verified quite fast. I've actually tried a couple of different accounts, and it took about 10 minutes for them to get approved, and I could start working on my website right away. You get a control panel with basic functionality, 10 gigabytes of storage, and unlimited bandwidth. This is enough for like 99.9 percent of websites, and I was able to install WordPress on my site quite easily. I even connected a custom domain free of charge.

Now, the downside of FreeHosting.com is that you must own a domain name to use their services. You can't add a subdomain, and you can't add a free domain as well; it must be a legitimate one, otherwise the hosting service won't work. If you're really looking to save, I recommend grabbing one of the 99-cent domains from providers like Hostinger, such as .xyz or .online. They work here with no problems and they only cost you one dollar for a full year.

Once my domain was added, I managed to upload a backup website that's quite heavy—around 400 megabytes of content with lots of pictures and animations. The performance is nothing special, kind of what you would expect from free hosting. The full load time was 4.2 seconds, meaning it's around four times slower than your average paid option, even the cheapest one you could find. I wasn't able to set up LiteSpeed to work properly, so this is an unoptimized website. Theoretically, it could be faster with some more time put into it, but this is free hosting, and I don't think it would be that much better.

On the bright side, there are no ads or banners on the FreeHosting.com website, the control panel, or even your site. The way they seem to be making money is from selling add-ons like mailboxes and subdomains for quite ridiculous pricing, I might add. They even have a paid plan for $7.99, which again is quite high. Never buy these paid options, because for the price of one add-on, you can actually get premium web hosting from other providers for 12 months straight, so these add-ons are obviously quite a bad deal.

What really helps FreeHosting.com, though, is the fact that there are no sketchy clauses in their terms of service, apart from the fact that they do collect information about you to provide their service, which is quite standard stuff. Most businesses do this and have this in their terms of service.

2. InfinityFree: Unlimited Features with a Catch

Now, what's completely not standard is the terms of service of InfinityFree. While they also offer free hosting with more free perks like SSL certificates and cPanel, they pretty much reserve the right to sell your data and your website's visitors' data—like payment information, emails, IP addresses, names, pretty much everything—for various marketing purposes like surveys, demographic studies, etc. This is pretty much how InfinityFree makes money. For that, you get free hosting that requires no credit card or verification. There are no limits on storage or bandwidth, or even simple functions like add-on domains and subdomains. Everything's unlimited, but again, you'll see ads everywhere: in the control panel, on the main page, and in the menus.

Just like with the previous provider, I created a website quite easily using the automated WordPress tools provided and managed to upload the same website backup to test the performance: 8.7 seconds full load time, two times slower than FreeHosting.com and eight times as slow as a standard paid provider. A funny thing is that when you're activating your account, they show you this warning:

Warning: If you do not accept email offers from them, they might deactivate your account.

This is quite a cheap scare tactic. Please don't ever accept this; they have no legal right to do anything about it. But moving on, InfinityFree will give you a better, more authentic experience of how web hosting works because they're using industry-standard control panels and tools, and they don't have any limits. So if you're looking to learn, this is probably a better option than FreeHosting.com.

3. 000webhost: A Hostinger Project with Strict Limits

Anyways, up to this point, I was able to load my test websites into these providers via backup functions with absolutely no problem. However, not with 000webhost. 000webhost is a free provider that's part of Hostinger, a larger web hosting company. However, they only give you 300 megabytes of space, and my website takes some more. Actually, after installing WordPress using their automated tools, I was already up to 150 megabytes, so I didn't have enough space to upload my website, which is more than 300 megabytes. As a last-ditch effort, I had to create a lighter website just to test the performance, so this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, but it's the best I could do. The performance is okay, fully loading a much lighter site than I tested with other providers in 3.5 seconds.

Now, the interesting part about 000webhost is that they do allow you to host adult content, while most even paid providers don't. However, the 300-megabyte storage limitation really, really hurts you here. You can't do much more than a light site. But again, no credit card or payments are required, and you can get started within minutes because the verification is automatic. However, I did have my 000webhost website deleted in the past without absolutely any warnings by accidentally going over the storage limits just by a tad bit. There are no warnings that you're about to go over, and they just wipe everything off your server, at least in my experience. For simple sites, I'd say this works quite well. You can even add a free domain here from Freenom. But for a complex site, there's a better way.

4. Oracle's Free VPS: The Pro-Level Choice

And I want to talk about that better way because it's what I consider to be the best free hosting option available. In most cases, it's even better than some of the paid plans I've encountered, but it does take a little bit of technical knowledge to get started. I'm talking about a free virtual private server on Oracle.com. I've actually set up my testing website here, and the results are impressive: a 1.5-second load time. The website has every premium feature, like a custom domain, SSL certificates, file managers, auto-installers, and even email. The way this actually works is you apply for a free server (you'll have to have a valid credit card for that to work, and you will get charged like one dollar for verification, but you'll get that back). Then, you use that server to host your website and your control panel. It's a bit technical, but there are numerous tutorials available online that walk you through the process step-by-step.

The Inherent Risk of "Free"

But before you go ahead and do that, remember that any one of these providers can, and probably will, delete your website at some point—even Oracle.com, which is a massive company. For example, one user reported that Oracle.com just deleted their server with everything on it, without a way to recover any of the files. And that is the biggest problem with free web hosting: the site is never actually yours. It's your content, it's your design, and it's your time invested, but ultimately, it's the provider's website. Because you're not paying anything for the hosting, they can add advertisements, they can delete the site at any point, and they can even farm your visitors and you for data.

Why Cheap is Better Than Free

So, in my opinion, it's actually never worth going with free hosting unless you just don't care about your site at all. You only need it for a couple of days or a couple of weeks for a project, and then you move on. I highly recommend this for students that just need to host a project or if you want to have a fancier presentation or maybe learn how everything works. But in all other cases, cheap is better than free. Because when you pay even a small amount, like two dollars a month, you can hold your providers accountable. You get support, you get backups, and they can't just poof your site out of existence whenever they want to free up space on their servers for other free users. Because you're a paying customer, they can't do that; it's illegal.

For cheap providers, InterServer or Hostinger are highly recommended. With InterServer, you can get one month of hosting for just two and a half dollars. So if you just need a website for one month, spend that two and a half dollars; it's going to be better than free. Or you can get six months for around $12.50. This is pretty much as cheap as it gets, and their performance is light years ahead of the free providers. At least you know that during your presentation, your website won't go down if you're using it for a school project. For something more permanent, you can find deals for multiple years of premium hosting for a one-time payment.

Note: You can test and compare these providers yourself using uptime monitoring services and performance testing tools like GTmetrix.

Remember, though, once you've got your free or cheap hosting provider ready, you'll also have to secure your website. This is extremely important, especially if you're using free hosting.