Is free hosting safe for your website? You might be thinking that it’s just a cheap service, right? You wouldn’t pay to host your website, would you? The truth is that free hosting is not always safe for your website. However, there are a few precautions that you can take to make sure that your website is safe with free hosting.
These precautions will help you keep your website safe from various threats such as malware attacks, database errors, and hacker attacks. In this blog post, you will learn everything you need to know about free hosting, including the pros and cons of each service. Read on to know more about free hosting and whether or not it’s safe for your website.
What is Free Hosting?
Free hosting is a type of hosting where the website owner doesn’t have to pay a single cent to have their website hosted. All the costs related to running your websites – like server maintenance, bandwidth charges, and security updates – are taken care of by the hosting company. There are many reasons why a business might choose this hosting option. The most common reason is to try out a new hosting solution before committing to a more expensive option. Other reasons include saving costs, having an inexpensive option for testing websites, or using a widely available service.
How Does Free Hosting Work?
It is possible to host your website without paying a cent. All you have to do is find a free hosting provider. To provide you with a free hosting plan, these hosting providers must abide by certain rules. One of these rules is that you cannot make money from your website during the free hosting period. If you were to host a website that made money from advertising, for example, then you would be breaking the terms of service with your hosting provider. If your hosting provider finds out, they might stop providing hosting services to you. This is why it’s important to ensure that your hosting provider doesn’t find out that you’re making money from your website.
Free Hosting Pros
- No Upfront Costs – If you want to try out a certain hosting plan first, it’s free. You don’t have to pay a cent for the service until you want to move to a more expensive plan. You can also use free hosting to test your website before committing to a more expensive option.
- Wide Availability – If you’re looking for a cheap option for hosting your website, you’re probably on a budget. Choosing a free hosting service can save you a lot of time and money, as most hosting companies offer cheap hosting plans in most countries.
- No Maintenance Fees: With the cost of server maintenance included in the hosting price, the only thing you have to do is make sure that your website isn’t hacked. But with free hosting, you don’t have to worry about any maintenance fees.
- Easy to Setup – Like expensive and professional hosting services, free hosting doesn’t require you to have any technical knowledge to get your website hosted. You don’t have to buy expensive software or hire an engineer to set up shared hosting.
- No Risk of Damage from Errors – With hosting companies charging you a monthly fee, there is a risk of damage and loss from server errors. You’re responsible for everything on your website, and if someone makes a mistake on your site, you’re liable for it. You are protected from damage and loss from server errors with free hosting as all hosting companies provide proper security updates.
- All-inclusive – There is no need to sign up for any other services or buy additional products. You have to put up your website and wait for the visitors to come in.
- Unlimited Bandwidth – Unlike paid hosting, you are not limited to how much bandwidth you can use on your free hosting plan.
- No Data Storage – Unlike paid hosting, you are not required to store any of your website’s data. This lets you save money on your hosting plan.
- No Annoying Restrictions – There are no restrictions on what you can and cannot do with your website with free hosting.
Free Hosting Cons
- No Protection from Hackers – Another reason free hosting is not safe for your website is that it’s usually not configured correctly. A hacker can easily compromise the server and gain access to your website. With the cost of server maintenance included in the hosting price, hosting companies have an incentive to make sure that their servers are configured securely.
- No Shield Against Server Issues – Shared hosting servers are constantly under stress, which means they are prone to server issues. A hosting company might not provide proper security updates, or the server might be configured incorrectly. Shared hosting servers are accessible to millions of users, which means millions of chances for someone to make a mistake and damage your website.
What are the most popular free hosting providers?
Here we have listed the 10 most popular free hosting providers for you. Of course, you can look at the free hosting services, but we still recommend you use a paid hosting option, as the service and security are usually better there. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on hosting, we recommend the hosting service from Bluehost, where you can get web hosting for under $70 a year, including a free domain.
InfinityFree
InfinityFree is a US-based web hosting provider launched in 2016, and, as its name suggests, it offers free hosting services for an indeterminate period of time. We all know that not everything presented as free hosting is truly free, but Infinity Free manages to live up to its name and does that without overloading your site with ads.
Besides highlighting that hosting with them is completely free (forever and ever) with unlimited disk space and bandwidth, Infinity Free fails to brief us about the company itself. From the information we were able to gather we learned that although the company was formally founded in 2016, it started providing free hosting in 2011 as a part of a passion project.
Wix
Wix is a cloud-based website builder that includes web hosting and design services. Its user-friendly drag-and-drop tools and over 500+ ready-made templates help you build your website without either having specialist skills or needing to hire a web developer.
Wix accelerates the web development process and gives you the creative freedom to build the website you desire. Wix is an ideal website builder for small and medium eCommerce businesses. It has over 200 million registered users across the world and is available in 17 languages (Wix). According to Enlyft, Wix’s largest customer base is in the US (57%), followed by the UK (6%) and Canada (6%).
000WebHost
000WebHost is a free web hosting provider based in Lithuania just like GoogieHost. 000webhost is a product of Hosting media which is now called Hostinger.
The main aim of 000webhost is to lure the customers by throwing the ‘free’ word and ultimately selling the premium services of Hostinger. As far as their hosting services are concerned, I would say they are adequate and satisfactory given that it is all free of cost.
If you want to run a minimalist blog or website than you can go for their hosting services.
Google cloud hosting
The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) refers to public cloud computing services provided by Google. It’s on par with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
In other words, Google rents out access to its top-of-the-line infrastructure and services to users. So, users aren’t just paying for access to Google’s network — they’re also getting access to its built-in security and performance optimizations.
AwardSpace
AwardSpace provides free web hosting for small websites that come with everything you need to get online quickly. You can also choose WordPress hosting or premium hosting services, including shared and VPS plans.
Awardspace offers free, but comprehensive, web hosting services and a website builder. You might think this is just a gimmick. But the free plan isn’t even their most popular option. Their shared premium hosting is.
Freehostia
Freehostia is a web hosting provider that’s been in business for over 10 years. They offer what they call “cluster hosting,” which basically means that each asset in their network serves a specific purpose and runs only a certain type of service. This enables them to provide affordable, high-performance web hosting to their users.
FreeHosting
FreeHosting.com is a very popular free web hosting provider, which has been in business for 22 years but still offers limited resources and low-quality hosting. If you think that you need more for your website you can check out most popular web hosting services here, which provide better features and high performance.
ByetHost
ByetHost is the child product of British web hosting provider iFastNet. It offers free shared hosting as well as premium hosting solutions, including shared hosting, VPS, email hosting, dedicated servers, and domain registration.
Despite once being based in the United States, the ByetHost servers are now in a data center in Newcastle, England.
While the ByetHost website looks a bit old, and much of the information isn’t updated, it’s pretty easy to navigate. You can view it in English, and all prices are shown in U.S. dollars.
HyperPHP
HyperPHP offers both free and paid hosting.
The paid hosting starts at $2.95 per month. Free hosting is also available. The general reviews on the internet about the free hosting version are not very good.
FreeWebHostingArea
FreeWebHostingArea has been around since 2005 and its main objective has stayed the same (cleverly “concealed” in the name of the company itself) ever since.
Is Free Hosting Safe?
Free hosting is not always safe for your website. This might surprise you, but free hosting is not very secure. Many risks are involved with hosting your website on a free, shared server. The hosting server itself can be a security threat, so it’s not safe to share a server with other users.
Also, the server you use might not be configured correctly. This can lead to many issues, like database errors, slow server speeds, incorrect website layouts, or even hacker attacks. Another issue with free hosting is that it’s usually very easy for hackers to compromise the hosting server. This can happen when the server is not configured correctly or the hosting company doesn’t provide proper security updates to the server.
Conclusion
When it comes to hosting your website, you have two options: shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is where multiple websites get hosted on one server. This is the most common type of hosting, and it’s usually cheap. But it’s not very secure.
Dedicated hosting is where your hosting company hosts your server on its server. It’s very expensive, but it’s the only safe and secure option. Shared hosting is the best option if you’re on a budget and looking for a cheap hosting option like Bluehost.
However, it’s not very secure, and shared hosting risks are involved. On the other hand, dedicated hosting is very expensive, and it’s not very accessible for new companies. If you’re just starting up a business online, you should go for dedicated hosting.
