Is Free Webhosting Reliable?

hilmy — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:43:44 +0000

Free hosting and no advertizing?

I have seen a lot of other things were given free of charge in the past but webhosting. So I went ahead to check out and subsequently signup myself an account out of curiosity.

Registration was straight forward except I felt a bit weird having to click on “order now” tab when all I wanted was just a free account.

You have to enter the domain name that you want host with 000WebHost or you may choose a free domain they provide. The snag is that this domain will have “.890m.com” TLD in it which you may not like.

Next enter your name, address, password and tick on T&C and you’re good to go.

After the usual email confirmation ritual, my account was created within minutes. You are then assigned with account id, cPanel id and FTP and passwords. I am still quite skeptical at that moment to say the least.

I was doing some navigation around and looked for DNS info and took a note of it.

I then moved on to NameCheap my domain registrar to assign new host to the domain I choose to host at 000WebHost.

You can still access cPanel and FTP using IP-based url for now without having to wait for your new DNS to propagate. It was said that it may take about 48 hrs to complete.

To my surprise, when I checked back less than 24 hrs later the domain has already gone live. This was what on the screen:

The cPanel looks and feels just like the one on any other hosts that I am familiar with. However I noticed there was no options for addon domains or parked domains.

Well, if you have many domains that need to be hosted then creating one cPanel for each will do. If you don’t mind the hassle.

I am still looking around for where they offer upgrades or something. Just wonder how they are making money out of this

Here are some of the features offered for free:

250 MB of Disk Space
100 GB Bandwidth
Full Domain Hosting
cPanel Powered Hosting
Host unlimited domains
Over 500 website templates
Free POP3 Email Box
Full Webmail access
FTP and Web based File Manager access
PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, Ruby.

I am going to hook up a monitoring system to record the site uptime and down. I’ll share that with you as soon as I got a good facts to present. For this purpose, FreeWebMonitoring.com will alert you via email as soon as a site goes down, as will UptimeAlert.com and both are free services.

Verdict:

Pros:
If a 250 MB Space, 100 GB Bandwidth, $0.00/mo, no advertising webhosting is all you need, 000WebHost may be the one.

Cons:
And before you go get it, perhaps it’s a good idea to search for what other people have said about 000WebHost. As it is free, you may have issues with uptime (or downtime), speed, support etc. Speed will become critical as more people hop on to this free service in the future and 000WebHost do not increase their bandwidth.

And, go for paid services if you can afford it as you are guaranteed good support and reliability. Most people I know of using free hosting just for testing purposes. Also you can also look at other free services and see what fit you best here at:

http://www.free-webhosts.com/webhosting-01.php

Enjoy.

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Is Free Webhosting Reliable?