Are you looking for a free web hosting service, one that doesn’t cost money but still offers pretty decent features? If so, you have come to the right place. Let’s take a look at the 5 best free web hosting services. Please note that a lot of hosting services restrict content so you’d have to elsewhere for adult web hosting.
000WebHost.com
Hands down one of the best free web hosting services out there is 000.WebHost.com. This is a truly free web hosting service with absolutely no cost associated with it, and it comes with some pretty decent features.
Some of the best features you get include PHP, a control panel, MySQL, and absolutely no advertisements. Considering that this is a shared free host, it also comes with pretty decent website speed. What’s also cool is that you get to have 2 websites with this service, if you so choose. It’s a super simple and easy web host that gets your site up and running fairly quickly.
Now, of course, it is a free host, so there are some drawbacks to it. For one, your website will have around 99.7% uptime, which means that it may be down for about an hour every other week, which is of course not the best. Moreover, you also don’t get any real customer support and you don’t get an email account. 000WebHost.com is pretty decent for being free, but there are some major limitations.
WordPress
Did you know that WordPress actually powers about 30% of all websites out there right now? That’s really a lot, and the reason for it, besides the fact that that it is technically free to use, is because it has a whole lot of features. However, keep in mind that you can get paid plans, for as little as $4, as well as more costly plans, but the most basic one is free.
There are tons of themes and customizable aspects here, which is what people really seem to love about it, and it comes with a massively high ceiling to allow websites to grow, nearly infinitely. With WordPress, you get 3 GB of bandwidth, for some pretty decent speeds. You also get a WordPress subdomain, and 3 GB of storage space.
That being said, one big drawback that you will notice with WordPress is that it is not a simple drag and drop website builder. In other words, you do actually need to know what you are doing to get a site up and running. Moreover, if you want more advanced features, you will need to pay for them.
Bravenet.com
Bravenet is a pretty decent free and fully packed web hosting service that serves over 15 million people. There are some pretty big bonuses that you get with Bravenet, such as the drag and drop website builder. This means that if you have no experience building sites, or you don’t know how to code, the drag and drop page builder will make things much easier for you. It’s one of the easier web hosting services around.
There are some pretty great community building and marketing features too, such as message boards, mailing lists, blogs, contact forms, polls, and other tools, plus there is even an email marketing system integrated as well (you will need to pay extra to upgrade and receive the email marketing system).
That said, you also get access to a pretty high-quality analytics dashboard, so you can see exactly how your website is ranking and performing. Bravenet even works for basic ecommerce, as it comes with a shopping cart, product listing, and product search capabilities. What does need to be said here is that Bravenet, the free version, only comes with 500 MB of storage and 1 GB of bandwidth, or in other words, speed and storage are both a bit limited.
x10Hosting.com
If you are looking for the latest and most up-to-date versions of PHP, MySQL, and cPanel, then x10Hosting.com is a good way to go. Moreover, with this free web hosting service you get unlimited bandwidth, which is nearly unheard of for a free service. What is also quite impressive about x10Hosting.com is that it comes with 3 free email accounts, as well as 2 add-on domains, 1 parked domain, and 2 subdomains, all of which usually don’t come with a free service like this.
Next, you get 1 GB of free storage with x10Hosting, which is not awesome, but not too bad either. It will work with some ecommerce, with 1-click installations of platforms such as Magneto. The website builder, although not particularly easy to use, comes with a lot of advanced features and customization options. Now, it doesn’t always experience the most uptime, but for a free service, it’s definitely one of the better ones out there.
Sites.Google.com
Yes, Google also has a free web hosting service — Google Sites — which currently has over 70,000 live websites. This service is 100% free to use, just like other Google products.
What is great about Google Sites is that you get highly responsive templates that work great on mobile phones, the embedding of JavaScript and HTML, and the websites can be integrated with mostly all other Google services. You also won’t have ads on your website, you get a free subdomain, and an SSL certificate. There is also the fact that you get a drag-and-drop page builder. Both uptime and website speeds are also quite impressive.
The downside here is that Google Sites doesn’t have many styling options, not many themes, and you can’t even add any more fonts or custom CSS either. Moreover, the SEO options are extremely limited, which can be quite an issue.
Conclusion
Free web hosting services can be great if you just need a small and basic website that works well enough but doesn’t need to be super fancy. Just remember that if you do want a more advanced and very highly functional site, you will probably need to spend a bit for it, but that is not to say that you can’t get a decent site up and running for free.
