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Unlimited Webspace/Transfer:

Let’s get one thing straight here. Both hard disk space and bandwidth cost money. There is no profitable way for a hosting company charging twenty dollars monthly to make this possible. So do you think they’re going to follow through with their promise? Probably not.

Usually what this feature means is that there is no automated cap on bandwidth or webspace allowance. Instead, they have moderators watching the accounts for any spike in either of these things. When they see that an account is using more than it’s fair share of resources, they’ll notify the webmaster and possibly suspend the account for a temporary period.

AutoInstaller:

Not all autoinstallers are created equal. Let’s take 000Webhost for example. They are a hosting company advertising an autoinstaller with their free hosting plan. What they don’t tell you is that half of the options are disabled or have been “temporarily out of service” for the past few years. It can really be a royal pain in the rear when the webmaster doesn’t have experience installing more advanced scripts.

In order not to fall for these fake autoinstaller programs, look for a web host that uses the “Fantastico” autoinstaller. Fantastico is integrated with CPanel, and is constantly being developed. They have their own website and all of their installations work great. It’s not something the web host has much control over as to whether it works or not, so chances are a Fantastico autoinstaller will be functional.

99% Uptime:

That isn’t exactly as good as it seems if you have returning visitors. This basically means that chances are, 1 in 100 page request aren’t going to load. It’s going to be something that visitors will probably notice and could prevent some sales. You’ll also probably notice the downtime while you’re developing the site as well, which can make troubleshooting more advanced websites very difficult. At first it seems a little ridiculous to complain about ONLY having 99% uptime, but after working with it for awhile any webmaster would be annoyed.

Most decent web hosts will actually have a decimal point added to this value. They’ll post something like 99.99% uptime. If a site has a 99.99% uptime, that means that on average 1 in 10,000 pages aren’t going to load. Chances are, even returning visitors aren’t going to load that many pages.

As an experiment, we decided to host a WordPress blog with them.  Our plan was to load it with multiple add-ons, third party scripts, and throw as much traffic as we could at them.  In theory, it would be nothing short of a miracle if the site lasted a day, since it was free after all.  Free hosting services don’t like you to use all their resources like that; they want to save it for their paying customers.

The first issue we ran into was with the automatic installation program.  When you sign up for 000Webhost, you are given what they call a CPanel.  We believed it to be a clone of the actual program, but just as well we wanted to try out the features anyway.  Just like CPanel, there is a “Fantastico AutoInstaller” program to use, and it has WordPress available.  However when we tried to install WordPress, we got this message:

“We are upgrading autoinstaller at the moment. We do not have exact date when it wil be finished.  However, you can upgrade account and immediately start using another autoinstalled that has 50 scripts ready to install in one click!”

There’s something wrong with this picture.  This is obviously a ploy to get people to buy hosting plans from hosting24 (that’s what happens when you click their link).  We know this because we’ve been tracking this error message for the past 4 months, from January 2010 to April 2010.  If they were planning on resolving this issue, it would have been done by now.

So we had to install WordPress the old fashioned way, through FTP.  No big deal really.  We uploaded the program and it took just shy of a half hour, which isn’t great but it could have been worse.  Then we set-up the MySQL database & ran the 5-minute-install without any trouble.

Next we had to install our add-ons, and that’s when we started having a little trouble.  While using WordPress itself to download & install multiple add-ons at once, we saw intermitted times where both the web server and MySQL server would not respond for a few minutes.  Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t.  This issue lasted for about two hours, and then the servers were working fine again.

Now that we had all of our data uploaded (including some forum posts), it was time to send traffic to them.  The easiest way we though of to do this was to simply purchase traffic from one of the SEO boards, as they sell cheap traffic all the time.  Now this traffic isn’t going to probably pay much attention to the site or click on anything, but what it would do is suck up all the bandwidth pretty quick as the pages would still be loaded.

We bought 10,000 visitors, spread them out over 5 days (2000 visitors/daily), and divided them among a few different posts.  The visitors started coming about 3 days after we purchased them, and for about 36 hours or so things were running quite smoothly.  We tracked both our web server and SQL server with a PING program from our computer and it resulted with an up-time of about 97%, which was acceptable.  But then we started noticing that our visitors had stopped.  We also got an e-mail stating:  “Your account has been temporarily suspended due to SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY, please contact an administrator”.

Using the forum board, we were able to contact one of their administrators via PM.  We didn’t explain to them the experiment that we were doing as we felt it would compromise the results.  What we wanted was to be treated like the common user.  The administrator took a look into the log file and told us that in order to use that much bandwidth, we would have to purchase hosting from hosting24.  Apparently, the amount of data transfer posted on the “features” page is only where the system automatically caps it.  If an administrator sees a large spike in bandwidth though, they will manually suspend your account.

We did get our account back after telling the administrator just who we were and what we were doing, and we didn’t have any issues after that.  But the lesson learned here is that if you have a site that has a lot of traffic, you can’t really milk 000Webhost for all their worth.  But for a personal website or small blog it should be alright.

If you have a used 000Webhost and want to share your experience please submit a 000webhost review/comment below.