Are you looking for someone who can host your WordPress website, but you are not sure whether free or premium hosting is right for you?
WordPress
If your website is to be successful, then you need the right hosting provider-after all, there are countless companies that can help you run your website, but a reliable, secure, and scalable WordPress hosting provider can help improve your website.
In this article, we will take a look at 5 WordPress hosting providers that can help you create and host a successful WordPress website for free.
Use SiteGround to host WordPress easily and quickly
And, if you are sure that you need performance and support for freely available WordPress sites, I will also introduce you to SiteGround, which is our recommendation for paid WordPress hosting.
Thanks to Envato's partnership with SiteGround, you can get up to a 70% discount on managed WordPress hosting.
What are the benefits of free WordPress hosting?
One of the main reasons why so many people choose free WordPress hosting instead of premium hosting is the clue: Free WordPress hosting is free.
Since you don't have to pay any upfront costs, if you have a limited budget or want to test drive some ideas before submitting a paid hosting subscription, free WordPress hosting is ideal. If you are not familiar with WordPress, then free hosting can also help you determine whether WordPress is right for you by providing you with hands-on experience with the platform.
Finally, if you don’t have any plans to monetize your website, then free hosting can allow you to indulge in blogging without paying for privileges.
Disadvantages of free WordPress hosting
Every free WordPress hosting provider has its unique advantages and disadvantages. However, if you choose free WordPress hosting, then you should encounter some or all of the following limitations.
Traffic, storage and MySQL limits
Free hosting providers often limit their servers, which means that your website may have difficulty handling large amounts of traffic. Some hosting service providers also limit disk space, database size, and the total number of MySQL connections you can operate at a time.
When designing these restrictions, one usually considers mark-up sales, because many free hosting providers also offer unrestricted premium services. Over time, your website may exceed its free hosting plan and you will have no choice but to upgrade to a paid product.
Stricter terms and conditions
Whether you choose paid hosting or free hosting, most providers have terms and conditions that specify how you can and cannot use their services. If you violate these terms, the provider may suspend your account or even completely delete your website and all its content.
In most cases, these restrictions are understandable. For example, most free and premium WordPress providers will not offer websites that promote illegal substances or activities. However, free hosting service providers are often pickier about the types of content allowed, and may sometimes cause problems with content that does not cause you special disputes, such as websites that prohibit any form of competition or competition.
In order to avoid losing access to the WordPress site and all content and data, it is important to read the provider's terms and conditions carefully.
Upsell email and a third-party spam
Free hosting providers also need to make a living, and a popular method is to encourage users to upgrade to premium plans.
Although occasional marketing emails are expensive for free WordPress hosting, the measures taken by some companies are too cumbersome and you may find yourself frequently receiving unsolicited emails. These emails range from blatant advertisements for high-quality products and services to more subtle up-promotion programs, such as emails that encourage you to check the provider’s latest blog posts, download their new e-books, or sign up for free webinars.
You should also know that if you do not pay for a product, then you are the product, so your provider may sell your information to a third party. If you choose a reputable WordPress provider, then theoretically you won’t receive any third-party spam, but it’s important to note that collecting and selling data is a popular way for companies to monetize their free products and services.
You are not a paying customer
When it comes to WordPress hosting, free does not necessarily mean bad.
All the companies mentioned in this article have received extensive feedback from the community and provide all the features needed to create and maintain a successful WordPress website.
Many free hosting service providers also offer premium plans whose business model relies on free users upgrading to one of their premium hosting packages, so they have an incentive to make free users happy.
But despite all these points, you will never have the same leverage as a paying customer. If your requirements are not met or you are not satisfied with the service, you can file a support ticket, file a complaint, or make a negative review of the provider, but you can’t threaten the one thing that all companies worry about the most: paying customers will transfer their business to other places.
Free WordPress hosting: 5 options compared
Despite the potential drawbacks, free WordPress hosting is one of the fastest and easiest ways to create a WordPress website.
To help your website get the best start, let's take a deep dive into five places for free hosting of WordPress websites.
1. WordPress.com
First, let's eliminate the obvious trouble: WordPress.com is a free hosting service created by the co-founders of WordPress.
No need to spend money on your own hosting solution, you can go to WordPress.com, click "Get Started", fill out some forms, and your website is ready to use.
WordPress.com is a fast, convenient, and convenient solution that provides strong security and reliable performance regardless of the number of people visiting your website. If you use WordPress.com as a provider, then you also don't have to worry about manually installing any updates or creating backups, because all of these are managed automatically.
Before jumping in, you need to pay attention to some restrictions:
You can not sell advertising space on the site ... in terms of generating revenue, which severely limits your choices, especially since you can not add a member function or e-commerce functionality to monetize the site.
...But WordPress can! WordPress has the right to place advertisements on your website. You have no control over which ads WordPress chooses to display, and you won't get any revenue from these ads.
You cannot upload plugins. The huge community of third-party plugins is one of the biggest advantages of WordPress, which allows you to add a variety of powerful, innovative, and appropriate features to your website. If you choose WordPress.com, then you will not be able to use any of these plugins unless you have purchased an additional plan for the WordPress.com VIP program or purchased Shell.
Limited storage space. The free account comes with 3GB of storage space, but if you need more than 3GB of storage space, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.
You can only use the theme provided. WordPress.com does not support custom themes, so you will only be able to use the free themes collection of WordPress.
Lack of support for third-party tracking platforms. WordPress has a built-in " Statistics" page, which displays some basic information, such as the total number of people visiting your website. However, WordPress.com does not support third-party tracking tools, so you cannot get a deeper understanding by installing tools such as Google Analytics.
You cannot delete the WordPress disclaimer. By default, the Powered By WordPress message will be displayed in the footer of your website. Although you can delete this disclaimer on WordPress.org, it is a permanent installation on WordPress.com.
You can only use WordPress branded domains. When creating a website with WordPress, its URL must include WordPress.com, such as mywebsite.wordpress.com. Unless you buy a custom domain name, you will be troubled by this WordPress brand!
2. 000Webhost: 99% uptime and 300MB of disk space
Compared with many other free hosting services, 000WebHost has very few limitations and offers impressive features.
For a total of $0, you will have access to a website builder, a one-click WordPress installer, 300MB of disk space, and free domain hosting that supports the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. According to the 000WebHost website, they also have 99% uptime and have a full-time management team to ensure that your website runs normally.
However, there are some limitations. To make it more difficult for spammers to abuse the platform, 000Webhost limits the number of concurrent MySQL connections to 30 connections per database. Your database is also limited to 1GB, with a maximum of 100 tables.
For most WordPress users, these restrictions shouldn't be a problem. However, if you use a large number of plugins, the page loading speed may be slow, and it may even cause a 502 Bad Gateway error.
The following plugins are also known to cause error 500:
W3 total cache
WP speed of light
WP's fastest cache
WP performance score booster
3. ByetHost's cluster hosting network
ByetHost provides free and premium hosting for more than 1,000,000 websites.
If you choose ByetHost's free service, you will get 5GB of disk space, an FTP account and file manager, unlimited additional domains, hosted domains and subdomains, and automatic HTTPS SSL.
You can also access ByetHost's own VistaPanel control panel and Softaculous application, which can install more than 333 scripts, including PHPbb3, Zen-Cart, osCommerce, MyBB, MyLittle Forum, 4images, Coppermine, SMF and Joomla. In order to improve performance, ByetHost maintains its own cluster hosting network to distribute your website traffic to multiple servers at the same time.
However, ByetHost only provides self-signed SSL certificates, so unless you explicitly trust your website, anyone who visits your website will receive a security warning. For many Internet users, security is a major issue, so this warning may have a negative impact on the number of people who actually click on your website.
4. AwardSpace: Use a custom "Zacky" tool
AwardSpace has many pricing plans, but they also provide free WordPress hosting.
If you choose their free plan, you can visit:
A free domain name. You can choose from free dx. am domains and a long list of free subdomains, although if you want a .com domain, you need to upgrade to one of AwardSpace's premium hosting plans.
Up to three subdomains with 5GB bandwidth and 1GB disk space.
Access the same high-speed network as AwardSpace paying customers.
MySQL database support.
One-click Zacky Installer.
AwardSpace’s Zacky website builder allows you to build websites without coding.
Visit AwardSpace's custom hosting control panel.
Web-based file manager makes uploading easier.
The built-in firewall and ClamAV antivirus software protect against hackers, spammers and other digital threats.
No ads. In the terms and conditions, AwardSpace clearly states that they will never force you to place ads on your website.
24/7 customer support.
As always, there are some disadvantages:
Even if you pay for AwardSpace's domain name renewal service, there is no guarantee that you can successfully renew your domain name.
For security reasons, all outgoing connections are disabled.
You are responsible for backing up your data.
The maximum upload file limit is 15MB, and certain file types are not supported, including MP3, .exe, Torrent, ZIP, .gz and .tgz.
If your website does not receive any traffic within 12 months, your account will be marked as invalid and may be deleted.
You are limited to a single MySQL database with a maximum space of 30MB. You are also limited to 12,000 MySQL queries per hour, with a maximum of 30 concurrent connections.
5. WPNode: DDoS and Cloudflare protection
WPNode provides free domain and subdomain hosting without ads, 1GB SSD storage and unlimited data transfer.
In order to protect your website from denial of service (DDoS) attacks, WPNode uses Cloudflare and hides the wp-config.php file, so it is not easy for hackers to access your information. If you choose WPNode as a hosting provider, your website will also be protected by a built-in firewall, malware detection, patch management, and reputation management.
WPNode provides 24/7 support to all customers, and their website is impressive, claiming that if you contact them through their support ticketing system, you can get an answer within a few minutes.
The negative is that WPNode staff manually verify each registration, which may take ten hours, so you may not be able to start using the WordPress site immediately.
WPNode will back up your content, but only once a week. To ensure that you do not lose a whole week of content and data, it is recommended that you perform your own manual backup in addition to the scheduled backup of WPNode.
Eliminate restrictions with premium WordPress hosting
As we have seen in this article, all free hosting providers have their own unique advantages and disadvantages.
If you know exactly what the hosting provider’s requirements are, then you should be able to find one that meets most (if not all ) free provider requirements. However, if you want to create a website for your business, have a plan to monetize your content, or have a long-term plan to grow your website, then it makes more sense to invest in quality WordPress hosting.
High-quality hosting providers usually do not set any major restrictions on traffic and storage, but instead, provide you with more options for monetizing content.
Interested in premium WordPress hosting? SiteGround provides advanced hosting of more than 2,000,000 domains, including WordPress.org's official recommended hosting WordPress hosting service. Most importantly, our partnership with SiteGround means you can get up to 70% off, easy-to-use WordPress hosting!
Some notable features of SiteGround include:
When you can take advantage of SiteGround's click-to-install solution, why download, install and configure WordPress manually? SiteGround's WordPress Starter tool gives you easy access to a range of professional website designs and key features that can be added to your website, including online stores and contact forms.
If you have an existing website, you can safely migrate all content to SiteGround without affecting the configuration.
SiteGround manages the overall security of the application at the server and firewall level, and they are constantly adding rules to help protect your website from new and emerging threats.
SiteGround is hosted on the powerful Google Cloud platform. In addition, SiteGround uses NGINX Direct Delivery, SuperCacher service, Memcached and Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN) to increase the loading speed of the website.
SiteGround can automatically update all plugins and WordPress software, so you will always have access to the latest bug fixes, patches, and features.
Want to know more? Explore SiteGround's various WordPress hosting solutions!
in conclusion
In this article, we explored some of the most popular free WordPress hosting services that you can start using today.
For many websites, free WordPress hosting can be a fast, convenient, and affordable option, but in some cases, free hosting may not be the most suitable option. To help you determine whether this type of hosting is right for you, we also covered some of the most common disadvantages associated with free hosting and introduced advanced alternatives that you might want to try.
