Staring at the title of this post you may be thinking : why to pay for web hosting when it is available freely in internet? Before beginning the post, I would like to make you clear: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The sole advantages of being "free" is followed by several limitations that you'll get acquaintance on further reading. If you are looking to create or host a website seriously, free webhosting is not for you.
When to choose a free web hosting?
- If you are looking to experience blogging in self hosted CMS and blogging scripts like wordpress, joomla, drupal,etc , forum scripts like phpbb, punbb, vbulletin, bbpress,etc and lots of other kinds of scripts. Hosting your blog in self hosted scripts will overcome all the limitations that you have with free blogging services provided by blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc. So, you can test these scripts, and decide whether to move for paid webhosting or not.
- If you are already using a self hosted scripts, you can make experiments with different plugins because plugins that are incompatible can generate errors and your blog/site may not open. Use it to tweak themes, and after you get the correct design, then change it in your website.
- It can be used to host images, scripts, files, etc. for free but there are better alternatives available.
Limitations of free web hostings:
- Instability and high down time rate
- No ownership
- Poor customer support
- Advertisements from web hosts may be present
- File upload size limitation
- Mysql account number limitation
- No Guarantee
- Poor customer support
- Inactivation after being idle for certain period of time
Excluding very few exceptions, these limitations imply to all the free web hosts. Many of them in this huge crowd make promises of being reliable but believe me : in this case promises are meant to be broken for sure. So, here is the list of best 5 free web hosts:
This is truly an exception to the free web hosts available and it is know for its good services. I've hosted my sites with these web hosts for a considerable period of time without any significant problems except very short down times which is quiet frequent. After your account is approved you can create multiple websites with these webhosts.
I will always remember x10hosting.com for the performance which is better than most of the paid webhostings. Before they had policy for account inactivation after 10 days of inactivity which was the major drawback but now they seem to have changed it. But, I have not tried it after my account got inactivated.
Orgfree is the other name for stability and trust. The websites I created long ago still exists regardless of the inactivity for a long period. The hosting is pretty slow and they run ads on your site but its the name you can trust.
Byethost
Speaking truth, I haven't tried their service but they seem to be one of the best free web hosts afters reading reviews on lots of sites.
The floor is open for the comments. Please share your experience with free web hosts and suggest other names which you think is reliable.
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