FreeHosting.com review: is free worth it?
Through independent research and testing, our team of experts offers transparent and thorough reviews of web hosting providers. We use the same testing criteria for all providers to offer a fair and unbiased assessment of each hosting service.
Our in-depth articles include feedback about our hands-on hosting experience and other crucial information for potential customers.
Learn moreIn this FreeHosting.com review, I explore the provider’s pricing, ease of use, performance, security, and customer support, to see if the host is worth a shot.
Before I start this FreeHosting.com review, I want to give you a fair warning: a free web hosting platform isn’t all that free. While you are not billed for hosting services, you are giving away your personal information and sacrificing your site’s security.
Often your site will be filled with ads, you will get limited resources, there won’t be any extensive security features, and poor performance is almost a given. Simply put, if you’re looking to create a functional website, finding an alternative hosting provider is highly suggested.
However, if you’re not looking to create a professional website and simply wish to explore how web hosting works, free hosting services might be of use. This is where FreeHosting.com can help. It is a legit web hosting provider that comes with an easy-to-use dashboard, 1-click WordPress installation, and a built-in site builder. In other words, you get all the necessary building tools to create a test site.
If you wish to know more about FreeHosting.com, keep reading this review as I explore everything from ease of use to performance and more.
⭐ Rating: | |
💵 Price: | From $7.99/month |
📑 Uptime guarantee: | - |
⚙️ Hosting types: | Shared hosting |
🌎 Server locations: | Germany and France |
👨💻 24/7 live support: | No |
🔥 Coupons: | Cybernews Web Hosting Coupons |
Pros and Cons of FreeHosting.com
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FreeHosting.com plans and features
FreeHosting.com is primarily a free hosting platform. However, it does offer a single paid shared hosting package, which can be billed monthly ($7.99/month) or annually ($79.99/month).
Type of hosting | What is included |
Free hosting | Allows hosting 1 website and comes with 10 GB storage, unlimited bandwidth, and 1 email account. More so, you can connect your own custom domain. This plan is suitable for testing only. |
Paid hosting ($7.99/month) | Allows hosting unlimited sites and includes unlimited disk space and bandwidth. More so, features like backups, weblogs, web stats, free SSL, Cron Jobs, and multiple email accounts are also available. This plan is best for small projects or landing pages. |
While the premium plan offers noticeably better resources than the free one, its price point is simply too high. Other providers like Bluehost offer similar server resources and a wider range of extra features for only a fraction of FreeHosting.com’s price. For this reason, my main point of focus will be the FreeHosting.com free plan.
Now talking about the free plan, here’s what you get:
- Ability to host 1 website,
- Single email account,
- Ability to connect your own custom domain,
- 10GB storage space,
- Unmetered bandwidth,
- One MySQL database.
I must admit, FreeHosting.com does offer quite a generous storage space and bandwidth on its free plan. However, it does not provide free subdomains, which means you have to have your own registered domain. More so, the lack of security tools in this plan is concerning. This only further confirms that free hosting should not be used for anything else than testing purposes.
Since FreeHosting.com is also aware that some necessary things are missing, it came up with a solution – one-time paid add-ons to the free plan. These add-ons can cost anywhere from $4.95 up to $30.
While some features might appear tempting, keep in mind, your free project will suddenly become not so free. Therefore, I recommend ignoring the paid add-ons completely.
All in all, FreeHosting.com is a legitimate free hosting provider that is great for experimenting and testing out things. The free plan comes with a pretty generous server resource package too. However, this host is not suitable for any commercial use due to the lack of advanced features and security measures.
Hosting management – is FreeHosting.com easy to use?
When it comes to ease of use, FreeHosting.com is very straightforward. You get 2 pretty standard panels – a web hosting client management interface (WHMCS) and a DirectAdmin panel.
First things first, you need to set up your free FreeHosting.com account. The process is really quick and all you really need for it is a registered domain. If you don’t have one, you can either purchase one from FreeHosting.com or any domain popular registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap.
Once you’re all set up, you’ll be redirected to your client management interface (WHMCS). Talking about WHMCS, the panel is well structured and very easy to navigate. Here you can access webmaster resources and contact support via tickets.
However, mainly this interface is used to manage your services and reach DirectAdmin – the main website management panel.
If you’re aware of everything that is included in FreeHosting.com’s free plan, you might be a little confused. Yes, the host does indeed claim to include a cPanel within its free plan, yet what you do get is a standard DirectAdmin panel.
While design-wise these 2 panels are quite different, the DirectAdmin panel is just as functional as a cPanel.
The interface is very clean and simplistic. All functionalities can be found in the left side menu, where you can manage your domain registration, email, file, and database settings, as well as install any content management system via Softaculous 1-click app installer.
Overall, FreeHosting.com offers a functional, easy-to-use DirectAdmin control panel, despite claiming that it offers cPanel. As for downsides, it is laggy and takes some time to respond to your actions.
Performance – is FreeHosting.com fast?
When it comes to performance, FreeHosting.com, just like expected from a free service provider, showed pretty poor results. The provider’s uptime and response time were significantly below average, while its ability to handle increased traffic was non-existent. However, the website's load time was very good.
FreeHosting.com uptime and response time
In almost 5 months of monitoring, the host had 319 outages, with downtime being nearly 4 days. That has resulted in a poor uptime of 97.58%.
While this result is not surprising, in its Terms of Service, FreeHosting includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee. But as you can tell, that doesn’t mean much.
Looking at the average response time, the host did not show any improvement either. Its response time has averaged at 1.56s, which is almost triple the industry standard of 600ms.
In sum, it’s very obvious that FreeHosting.com lacks stability and reliability in terms of uptime and response time.
FreeHosting.com speed test
For this test, I wanted to see how fast FreeHosting.com can load both an empty and a fully built WordPress website. And surprisingly enough, the host did really well.
Before we jump to analyze the results, here are 2 measures I’ll be evaluating:
- The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – the time, in which the largest element (image, font, video, etc) on the site is loaded. For the most effective search engine optimization, aim for a time that’s under 2.5s.
- The Fully Loading Time – then time the site takes to fully load. For the best user experience and lower bounce rates, aim for a time that’s under 3s.
For an empty WordPress site, FreeHosting.com’s LCP came up to 1.2s, while its Fully Loaded Time followed up at a speedy 1.4s. Both measures are definitely fast. However, an empty WordPress site does not represent real-world performance and only shows raw server performance.
Therefore, to get a more realistic view, I loaded my website with content and ran the test again.
This time around, the fully-built WordPress website’s LCP came up to 1.6s. The Fully Loaded Time was also a very speedy 1.9s. Simply put, both measures have more than enough wiggle space until the undesired 3 and 2.5 second time marks.
All things considered, FreeHosting.com had a very impressive load time that could compete even with the fastest hosting providers in the market.
FreeHosting.com stress testing
The last test aims to see if FreeHosting.com can handle increased traffic on the website.
To begin with, I started this test by sending 50 virtual users (VUs) to the site. I must note that having 50VUs on your site continuously for a month could result in 50 000 monthly visits. That is intense traffic that can easily overwhelm a server.
So it's really no surprise that FreeHosting.com failed the first test miserably.
While 50VUs was too much for the host, I’m still curious to see what kind of traffic the host can handle. So I lowered the number of VUs by 5, until the first pass.
Sadly, the provider was not able to handle even 5VUs on the site. This means that the host is unable to handle any kind of traffic.
In comparison, 000WebHost, another free hosting provider, can handle up to 20VUs. If you wish to know more about this host, read our 000WebHost review.
Getting back to the FreeHosting review, ideally, the blue line (response time) should be stable and as flat as possible, despite the grey line (number of users) going up. In this case, there is no blue line, as almost all requests to the server have failed (red line).
Simply put, the host is incapable of handling any traffic, which further suggests that it is only good for testing and not much else.
Overall, FreeHosting.com failed the majority of performance-related tests. The uptime, slow response time, and ability to handle on-site traffic are well below average. However, the host’s load speed was pleasantly surprising.
Security – is FreeHosting.com secure?
Just like performance, security is not FreeHosting.com’s strong point either. The provider is lacking even the most basic features like an SSL, while paid options are very limited too.
There is no clear information on what server-level security measures FreeHosting.com applies. Yet, it’s pretty obvious that features like an SSL certificate, DDoS protection, or even automated backups, do not exist within the provider’s free plan.
However, the provider does offer a paid SSL add-on that comes for $29.95. Not cheap, but they do claim that this is a one-time thing. Although, I must note that this seems to be the only security measure that FreeHosting.com offers. So if site security is something you prioritize, check out our list of most secure web hosting providers.
All in all, FreeHosting.com does not come with a robust security package. This means that you should not trust it with any personal information whatsoever.
Customer support – will FreeHosting.com help me?
FreeHosting.com offers support via the ticketing system, as well as includes a very basic knowledge base. Apart from that, it also offers hands-on support via paid add-on.
Many FreeHosting.com reviews claim that the host’s customer support is quite unresponsive. And I have to agree. Since the host uses a ticketing system as its main support channel, all queries take a long time to get answered. If they even get answered…
At the same time, the provider also has a knowledge base, where you can find frequently asked questions and a few articles on how to get started. However, it’s very limited and there is no clear indication of how often it is updated.
While ticketing and knowledge base is everything you can get for free, FreeHosting.com has 1 paid option – hands-on support. This is only useful if you’re looking for technical fixes or configurations for your site. However, note that this help will cost you $30… per task.
In conclusion, FreeHosting.com lacks any real customer support. The ticketing system is unresponsive, knowledge base is quite limited, and there is no active user community either. At the same, paid support is unreasonably priced and only suitable for technical issues.
FreeHosting.com review – the final verdict
In this FreeHosting review, I found that it does not provide a reliable hosting environment. With non-existent customer support and below-average performance, you cannot expect much out of FreeHosting.com. However, the host is more than perfect for learning purposes.
Feature | Free hosting for learning purposes | |
Pricing | FreeHosting.com offers a completely free plan, no credit card is needed. | |
Ease of Use | The DirectAdmin custom panel is easy to use but might suffer some lagging. | |
Performance | FreeHosting.com uptime results were poor (97.58%), response time was above average, and the host was unable to handle any on-site traffic. The website’s load speed, surprisingly, was fast. | |
Security | The free plan offers no SSL with no clear information on its other security features. | |
Support | FreeHosting.com has no free professional customer support, yet you can use the ticketing system and its knowledge base. |
Who do I recommend FreeHosting.com to?
In short, FreeHosting.com is a good option if you’re looking to explore how web hosting and website creation works. While the host does offer pretty generous server resources, it’s only good for learning and testing purposes. So, I would recommend looking for more advanced alternatives.
Alternatives to FreeHosting.com
By now, it should be clear that free hosting is not always a good pick. We primarily do not recommend free hosting services due to the lack of reliability and security measures. The good thing is that if you’re on a budget, there’s an abundance of good cheap web hosting services out there. Some of the most popular ones include Bluehost and Hostinger.
Bluehost
Bluehost is a highly affordable hosting provider, recommended by WordPress itself. The plans come at a very reasonable price, starting from $1.99/month.
Bluehost is a great pick for a complete beginner and a business owner, as it comes with an easy-to-use interface and business-focused tools. Additionally, the host also offers highly reliable and robust servers, excellent security, and good customer support.
Hostinger
Hostinger is another great alternative to FreeHosting.com. Its shared plan starts at just $1.66/month while providing ample power and features.
Hostinger shines in many departments, including security, speedy servers, generous server resources, and reliability. Apart from that, you also get 24/7 customer support.
More web hosting reviews from Cybernews:
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HostGator review: navigate robust hosting solutions and support
Liquid Web review: dive into premium hosting performance and reliability
InMotion Hosting review: exploring features and performance
FreeHosting.com FAQs
Is FreeHosting.com legit?
Yes, FreeHosting.com is a legit web hosting option, that offers a free hosting service with limited features and restrictions on storage space. The provider is good for testing purposes. However, for a functional website, it's better to pick a cheap hosting provider.
Is FreeHosting.com really free?
Yes, FreeHosting.com is really free. However, while you are not paying actual money, you are “selling” your personal information in exchange for the services.
What’s the issue with FreeHosting.com?
There are many issues with FreeHosting.com, including below-average performance, security, unresponsive customer support, and no free subdomain.
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