Free Web Hosting

6 minute read

Free web hosting is a service offered by many hosting companies as an easy way to create a web site.  It is most often supported by advertisements added by the hosting company.

Some hosts do not display ads, but offer limited resources to disk space and bandwidth, allowing the web site owner to upgrade when more resources are needed.

Types of Free Web Hosting

Full Hosting

For a free site, full hosting would include pretty much everything a paid plan would, but resources are limited and/or ads are used to support the cost of hosting the site. Most often, disk space, bandwidth, the number of sites, and reliability are limited.

Reliability can be a big one. The hosting company will prioritize their resources for responding to server downtime and support requests from customers.

Those on the free hosting plan are likely to be last in line. So, when something goes wrong, it will take longer to fix, and the site may be offline for a while.

That being said, free hosting can be great for small sites which don’t have much traffic. Some companies offering free full hosting include:

000webhost
These guys are generally regarded as the most popular free hosting service. They offer their free plan with limited resources and no ads, which is really nice. When you are ready for more resources, they have paid plans available.

Freehostia
Very similar to 000webhost in that they offer free hosting service with limited resources. Paid plans are also available for when more resources are needed. They claim to have a one hour response time for support on the free hosting plan.

Blog Hosting

There are numerous companies out there offering hosted solutions for blogs and web sites. Some specialize just in blogging, where others offer a full site building experience.

Typically, you don’t have the option to use your own domain name, unless you pay a monthly fee. The site performance of hosted services is usually pretty good.

Free blogging services offer the tools to write posts and add a few pages. Some examples of blog hosting companies:

Blogger
Owned and operated by Google. The process to sign up and get started writing blog posts is quite easy. Blogger has been around for a while and is quite popular.

Wordpress
The most popular blog content management system has a free blog hosting service. You can use many of the same features as your own hosted Wordpress site. Support and disk space are more limited than paid plans.

These and other similar blogging services are a great place to start if you are looking to start a blog. Once your blog becomes popular, you can always get your own domain and switch to a paid plan.

Site Building Hosting

Site builder hosting companies are very similar to blog hosting providers, but their tools for creating a site are more extensive and feature rich. The tools available usually include a drag and drop interface for web site elements, such as images, text, and videos.

As they develop their services further, some companies have expanded their offerings to include e-commerce, memberships, and email marketing. Some examples of site building hosting companies:

Weebly
One of the more feature rich companies offering many services, including the ability to edit the template files to alter the display of your site. Their servers seem to be quite responsive.

Wix
The most popular site builder company out there. Wix has hundreds of different templates for use on their hosted service and a lot of neat features can be added to your site. They are constantly innovating and adding new widgets.

Static Site Hosting

A static site is a web site where the content does not change very often. The very beginning of the world wide web saw only static sites being available with the use HTML and CSS.

More recently, static site generating software has become available. This allows for the inclusion of more dynamic content but has the benefits of a very fast loading web site.

When content changes, the entire site is rebuilt from templates, images, and saved content files. All these are run through the static site generator software, which spits out the static files, and then those are uploaded to the web server to replace the existing ones there.

Static sites can require quite a lot of technical knowledge, especially for free hosting services. Some hosting companies are starting to change this by offering content management systems built around static site generators, but they charge a fee for this. We will learn more about these options in another section.

There are many companies offering free hosting for static sites, some of those are:

Github Pages
Sites here are generated and updated from a code repository. They are generated using Jekyll. Github allows for the use of your own domain name as well, which is really rare for free web hosting.

Bitbucket
Very similar to Github, as sites are generated and updated from a code repository, however, they don’t allow you to use your own domain at this time.

Dropbox
Primarily a service to store any type of file in the cloud, Dropbox also offers free static site hosting.

Is Free Web Hosting Right For Me?

In general, free web hosting is great for those who are first starting out, especially the blog and site builder providers.

For those of you who have more knowledge in hosting and development, static sites are an excellent resource to utilize if you are willing to put in the work to get them up and running.

Free full hosting sites generally have sub-par support and resources available to run a modern site, so I don’t recommend those.

Terms Used On This Page

Cloud
The cloud is really just the physical infrastructure of servers put together with software for a particular purpose, such as storing files or emails.
Code repository
A place to store programming code for a web site or software project. Code repositories make it easier for developers to collaborate and revert changes.
Content management system
Software designed to help non-technical users of a web site create content without having to learn how to write code. A few examples are Wordpress, Drupal, and DotNetNuke.
CSS
Cascading style sheets are used to define the display of a web site, such as headings, text, images, and layout.
Disk space
The amount of space on the hard drive you can use for web site files on a server controlled by a web hosting company.
Domain
An identifying string (sequence of characters) defining the location of a web site. An example is google.com.
Dynamic content
Content loaded on demand, usually using a database. Truly dynamic content is interactive and personalized to the person visiting the web site.
Ecommerce
The buying and selling of products and services on the Internet.
Email marketing
Advertisements and newsletters sent to a list of people who have agreed to receive them from a company. These can have a variety of uses from news updates, to the latest content added to a site, and product or service offers.
HTML
Hypertext markup language is the language of web sites. HTML defines the structure behind a web page.
Jekyll
The most popular static site generator.
Memberships
Some web sites are known as membership sites because they offer content or services in exchange for a fee.
Server downtime
The time a server, and all web sites located on it, are not available to be loaded due to hardware, software, or network related problems.
Template
A prepared design for a web site without the content. Templates make creating web sites and content much quicker.