Money Two Oh

The Free, the Cheap and the Expensive I: Free Hosting

Tuesday, 09. 16. 2008  –  Category: The Domain Book

For a beginner, it makes sense to start with a free host. There are some that offer amazing results, considering their cost (nothing!). They too imply, however, a couple of serious drawbacks.

The most important one is reliability. Free hosts come and go. They can be here today, gone tomorrow. Most of them aren’t serious companies. Actually, most of them aren’t even companies!

I have maybe ten free hosting accounts. Almost every one of them has brought trouble. I’ve had all kinds of them: once, I couldn’t log in to the FTP server. It wouldn’t authenticate me no matter what. The problem hasn’t gone yet. Support hasn’t helped at all. I have abandon that account and moved on, but to do it meant some wasted time.

Another thing that has given me some headache with free hosts (and with some cheap shared ones too, to be honest) are limited resources. In a free hosting environment, accounts always share server resources. The servers use to be crowded with accounts so there are very few resources left for each account. So forget about CPU or memory intensive stuff like RSS parsing, and pray for not getting promoted to Digg’s homepage (it rarely happens, but it could, and if it happens, the traffic volume is going to make your server fail for sure, and you’re going to loose quite a lot of visits).

Other serious inconveniences of free hosts are that they very rarely allow more than ten domains in each account, which means that, if you see you’re making well, you will either have to move to a paid host or to open several free accounts, with the extra headache that means.

One last warning about free host. I would never ever again use a host running Layered Panel. It’s a popular control panel amongst free hosting providers, but it’s the biggest piece of software crap I’ve ever seen. This is just my opinion, right, but remember it’s based on painful personal experience.

As I said, free hosts come and go, and the ones that are good for today won’t be necessarily good tomorrow (if they still exist…).

Up to this date, and after trying a lot of them, my most trusted free hosting provider is 000webhost.

I’ve got a couple of domains with them and so far so good. I haven’t had any of the issues I’ve had with others… Their control panel (take a look at the introductory post about hosting, if you haven’t yet) is a strange brew of cPanel, I think, or at least it bears a certain resemblance with cPanel, and it’s as usable (which is what matters, after all). They offer Fantastico script autoinstaller, PHP mail() function and Sendmail, Curl, GD2 library, ImageMagick, Zend, fopen() and PHP sockets, safe_mode OFF, Zend Optimizer support, Ioncube loader…

I’m very happy with them, I totally recommend giving them a try. After all, it won’t cost you a cent! What do you have to loose?

Next Tuesday | Hosts: the Free, the Cheap and the Expensive (II)

Tags: control panel, cPanel, Digg, free hosting, Layered Panel, limited resources, PHP, RSS, server resources, traffic volume, Zend