The Best Web Hosts For Beginners: You Should Use These Top Free Web Hosting Sites
Many web hosts offer hours of experience for free. Today I’ll look at what a few of those offers have to offer- some “almost-free” still charge you for hosting and others don’t!
Guaranteed Satisfaction: Notes & Caveats
- Free web hosting often comes with various risks, so we do not recommend them to serious website owners.
- Hostinger is a blog post writing platform that is heavily discounted, with users only needing to pay $1.99 per month.
- If you are looking for a paid hosting service, check out Jerry’s top ten hosting picks. The use-case comparison tables are especially useful to serious buyers.
Top 10 Free Website Hosting To Consider
1. Hostinger
Hostinger offers a wide range of hosting plans, including Shared Server Hosting, VPS Hosting, and website builder.
Hostinger has an established and successful brand that supports global market growth. With this many customers, Hostinger also reaches a diverse audience. Hostinger provides risk-free hosting with advanced cloud infrastructure to their 29 million global users.
Jerry recommends Hostinger, an ultra-cheap web hosting firm for those who have a smaller budget and want a low risk option. It is recommended for beginners or those who want to try something out of their price range.
Since May 2018, Hostinger has been the host of our new site, and it’s continuously been delivering a rapid return for our business. We’re now rated as an “A” in most speed tests thanks to the service.
Server Upgrade: The Cost and Options
Hostinger provides a free plan but is more affordable in price with packages that enable you to do the following: enable automatic daily backups, host more domains, and run unlimited cron jobs. The next level of service is offered at $2.99/month.
Our review of Hostinger’s popular plan
Hostinger’s plan is really cheap, though it comes at a cost. The single hosting plan does not have a free SSL or daily backup, and the $1.99 per month deal only lasts for four years—longer than the normal recommended subscription period (24-months period).
Providing reliable and trustworthy website hosting for $1.99/mo
2. Weebly
When I first looked at Weebly as a site building tool, I wasn’t considering it as a web hosting host. However, after reading this article on it, I realize that it is essentially an up-sold web hosting service. Weebly is one of the new generation of site-builder-slash-web-hosts that has been doing fantastically well since its release in 2008 with its rank of 393 on Alexa.
Weebly is well supported through a community of users and they also have email and live chat.
As Weebly is aiming to sell its online store builder, it focuses on key points related to transactions. With upgrades, you can increase the basic features like a blog and e-commerce platform. The highlight is on how many products you’re allowed to sell at once. If this is your only interest in the website builder, then there are multiple plans ranging from $12-$25 per month.
Can you still get Weebly hosting for free?
If you want to design your own website, Weebly may be a good option. However, if you use any other services that it doesn’t natively support, such as server-side scripting or database integration, your website might not work properly. Additionally, sites created with Weebly will have http://weeblynavy.com subdomain. In terms of features offered by this platform, you will be satisfied with this investment, but it’s difficult to find leverage points in case that you need different tools later on.
3. Wix:
Wix is a website-building tool that was one of the earliest online tools to enter the market during the new generation. They are easy for newcomers, and their structure offers enough for starters to get interested before they hop on to any othe sites.
How a reliable CDN stack can increase customer satisfaction
For free accounts, you pay for what you get and it can sometimes take a while for the company to help. For premium accounts, the company responds faster and is able to answer any question or issue they may have.
When it comes to website development, Wix offers a few different plans. While their most expensive plan can fetch up to $24.50 per month, their lowest priced plan goes for $4.50 per month. They offer a wide variety of uses in the higher end plans that not only include form builders and email campaigns, but also offer website reviews by professionals.
4. 20i
20i is a UK-based web hosting provider that launched just over 10 years ago. The company is backed by a long and illustrious track record. They currently have a rather large range of services, including a free CDN of their own.
You can get a free plan with your own ad-free site and earn money through ads on your site. The features they offer are all worth it, especially when compared to other unsatisfactory subscription plans from less reputable providers.
As the next step up from their free plan, I recommend trying a few of their standard hosting options. However, if you don’t care about the lowest tier and want everything for your business available unmetered, skip past them and go straight to ‘Premium’. With a premium account you get more resources than anyone else!
What’s the difference between a 20i free plan and the subscription pricing?
The 20i network is generous. However, bandwidth limits were decided on to comply with standards. All free users have a limit of 250MB per month, the company states this will disappear quicker than you can say, “boo”.
5. 000Webhost
As of 2007, 000Webhost offers totally free web hosting in exchange for advertisers. They offer a business model just as viewable on their free end of the site. With free ad revenue and a scalable paid plan, the company makes profitability on users no matter where they are on their website’s evolution.
There’s a 99% uptime guarantee for free accounts with 000Webhost, but you should consider the 1-hour sleep period. This means your actual server uptime starts at 95.83% – less any technical difficulties .
000Webhost offers a range of hosting plans for those who are interested in paying by the month. Generally speaking, longer term contracts cost less.
6. 5GBfree
As far as their web hosting services go, 5GBfree is relatively new, but that might be a good thing because they claim to offer the latest in technology with CloudLinux and equipment hosted at a US-based, PCI and SAS 70 Type II certified data center.
Another company that offers a free and scalable service is Knowledge Base. This company supports free accounts by offering a knowledge base to non-branded content and through a community forum.
Unfortunately, there was no mention of uptime on 5GBfree. There was also no information about reliability. Small mercies abound since at least you have options to backup your files and databases in the back end. The same goes for the Pro account plan as well.
For $2.95 a month, the Pro account which the host offers is dirt cheap and seems like it offers what many highly reputable web hosts have.
5GBfree offers great service, with a possible downside
The basic specifications of the free account seem fine, but there are only 5 GB of storage capacity. Emails sent through this service are also your own responsibilities. Sign up at your own risk!
7. Awardspace
Awardspace has been a web hosting company offering both shared and virtual server plans since 2004. Over time, they have been updating their service offerings and replacing outdated tech with more modern tools. They launched a completely redesigned website last year and offer uptime refunds for any lost time on their servers.
For a monthly fee and with a limitation on uptime, you get service level agreements from Awardspace. For those features there is a no-questions-asked refund within the first 30 days if you are not pleased with the service from an AI.
Grantspace offers prices starting at $5.20 per month and going up to $10.30, with discounts of 98% off for new users.
With no catch and fair pricing, Awardspace offers a decent amount of free credits for newbies. The plan tiers get progressively more expensive, but with added benefits for the paid plans.
8. Byet Host
ByetHost is a free hosting provider which offers “fastest free web hosting in the world!” This might be because it doesn’t factor in anything other than processing speed and Time to First Byte. Their cheapest plans are also provided with six free domains. This provider has a ton of goodies, so be sure to check it out.
One of the most interesting things about Byet Host is that it offers 24-hour customer support for free accounts. This means that even if it takes them some time to deal with tickets, they’re not often a host that offers real support. Most other hosts either have knowledge bases or forums where you share and help each other.
Unfortunately, free accounts of Copymatic aren’t enough, as they offer only limited features. Byet Host has more features including faster SSD-powered performance, free domains and a different control panel (cPanel). Prices start from $4.99 per month all the way to $7.99 per month.
9. Dreambox
However, Dreammix is different from a classic free server because they offer extras for good optimization with sharp limitations. This fits in line with their idea of “try before you buy”.
It’s hard to say whether this is a scam or not since Dreamnix always stresses their money-back guarantee and they only ask to take your credit card information when they have your article. They only ask for your card information after you decide to buy any service that they offer because they want you to try the first few before you buy.
Once you’ve outgrown your free hosting plan, it mainly differs in terms of add-ons such as access to sick space or job scheduling. The two essentials are bandwidth and website space, which can go up to unlimited each with the lowest plan available at $1.95 per month, changing to a yearly subscription at $4.95 for instance.
In the report, this platform’s limited geographical locations wasn’t a big deal. They are nicely spread out worldwide so there shouldn’t be any traffic issues here.
10. Freehostia
Freehostia boasts at being able to offer hosting for more than ten years and for a high end offering of dedicated servers. However, its data center is limited to just Chicago.
While free hosts do have an uptime of 99.9%, that might not be the case with paid plans. Freehostia doesn’t give out this information; this makes it difficult to discern whether your paid plan is reliable or not.
In contrast, Freehostia offers different plans of incremental capacities. Furthermore, an emphasis seems to be placed on the amount of space given; however, storage is practically dirt cheap and companies typically provide such features for free. Pricing starts at $14 per month up to $65 per month for their upgraded plans.
Today, one of the biggest concerns is storage space and so Freehostia offers too many plans. There are 250MB web hosts to choose from and wondering which plan is best can be difficult.
