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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.

“Custom” or “Limited” CPanels:

These often aren’t real CPanel systems at all. They’re just PHP scripts the hosting company paid someone to write for it to look like the real thing. A lot of times the advanced features in these panels are designed not to work properly, and suggest to you to upgrade to a premium package. Also, CPanel tutorials will not work properly since there are usually a lot of differences in design and menu layout.

Downtime:

Sometimes these hosting companies actually increase the downtime for their free servers. After all, they don’t make any money making sure they’re in tip-top order now do they? You’ll notice that in peak times in the day (usually noon), it will be hard to get pages to load properly. The truth is that they are purposely down during these busy times of day to make high-traffic web sites switch to premium hosting in order to make a better experience for their visitors. Web hosts know that high-traffic sites mean webmasters that will probably have no problem paying their hosting company and may even upgrade to a more expensive premium hosting package.

Free Host Advertising:

No professional web site should mention “Free hosting provided by…”, as this makes a site look very un-professional and un-trustworthy. If your site has any kind of e-commerce system, people won’t want to buy from it with little annoying “free hosting” ads everywhere. After all, where is all their money going anyway? Obviously the owner doesn’t think to much of his business. It’s like taking your child to the pediatrician working out of his car. People are always cautious spending money online, and most will look at every little clue they can find in order to tell if a business is “real” or not.

Customer Support:

The last real advantage to having a premium hosting package is that you are now a paying customer. You can play the “I pay you guys every month…” card while contacting their customer support service. People will be a lot more willing to help you when they know that your contributing to their paycheck rather than someone that’s trying to mooch off the company for a free service. Usually, the company will even inform you of the great customer support features you’ll get when signing up for a premium package.

Web hosting service is actually the provision of your storage space in a remote server and the bandwidth necessary for your visitors to access your website through your domain, say something like www.yourdomainname.com. A modern web hosting provider can offer many services which are very useful as well as important for advanced websites, online software applications, or when you’re planning to launch a complex website.  They will not be required by an average user who wants to erect a simple website.

If what you require is a simple website, with a gallery, some internal webpages and some information about you, your company, your brand or whatever that interests you and like to share with others, you can surely use a free web hosting service.

Many free web hosting providers are there on the Web, and most of them provide a good service, but they insert advertisements on your homepage, which many visitors find annoying.  Others though their hosting service is free of advertisements, yet their webspace is limited or they will not allow the use of PHP or MySQL which is important when you’re using databases on the website.

Many free web hosting providers occupy low ranks on listings, and this means that your website will be out of reach of your potential customers.  Anyhow there are some benefits in using free web hosting to establish your presence on the Web, particularly if you’re a beginner and want to learn before you invest on your website.  Remember to do your research on the free web hosting providers before choosing one for you.

In some cases when some hosting providers say they offer a reliable and free shared web hosting service it usually means they are after something from their service users – which is you and many others. It could be anything from posting on their forums, renewing and paying for the service you are using at the end of the month, and some providers even want your email to put in a list so they can sell that list to advertisers and make a lot of money from it – which is completely legal because when you sign up to their service you are signing an internet signature which means you agree to their terms and conditions which usually includes the ability to sell your email to third party advertisers.

You may even find yourself running into a scammer if you are one of those people who uses 1 or 2 passwords to login to every form on websites you use – they can easily steal your passwords and you may not even find out about it. If you are using a free service make sure you think about the little things such as using different passwords and maybe registering a new email to use for the free service just so your regular email doesn’t get spammed to death by advertisers. Using a free hosting provider isn’t always worth the hassle as a lot of them aren’t reliable and promise a service you won’t get.

You have to make an educated guess about whether your target consumer or reader will be sufficiently distracted by the flashy extras that have nothing to do with your site to go elsewhere. Often, the answer is yes, unfortunately. Besides selling banner and other ads that will go on your site, free host companies pick up opportunities to add to their customer base every time someone links to your new site.

But there are good things about free web hosting. The main one is cost. If you are just starting out, you may have a very limited budget, and you may want to concentrate your funds on other aspects of your business than your website. You can go ahead and set up one or more free websites using different hosts, and by trying out the features on each, determine which of the free sites works best for your needs. You might also pick up valuable information, such as which free sites get you indexed by search engines and listed on Google fastest. You’ll only be out the cost of your time for doing this kind of research.

This article assumes that you are a novice webmaster, and that is one reason you’re exploring the use of a free host service. Before you make that decision, however, you need to have a business plan, and you have to know what kinds of features you want your website to have. If “ad-free” is one of the features, then free web hosting is not for you. Do you want multiple email accounts? How much hand holding do you need as you set up your site? Will your site be heavy on graphics, or will it be mostly text? Knowing the answers to those questions will help you rule out service providers quickly.

If you’re willing to put up with a few inconveniences, like the pop-up ads, then free hosting just might work, at least when you’re starting out. To find the good free hosts, don’t just go to the host’s own site. You’re unlikely to find any criticism there. Rather, find a site forum that discusses types of web hosting, and ask some questions. You’re more likely to get honest answers from those with experience using these services. But you do have to be careful, however. Companies have been known to have “plants” in discussion forums to give glowing reviews of their services, and/or scathing reviews of the competition. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t place too much stock in overly positive or overly negative reviews, particularly the kinds with plenty of capital letters and exclamation marks. Let cooler heads prevail.

No one free hosting service will please everyone, because website needs vary so widely. You will have to weigh your business plan against the perks offered by free sites, and you may have to compromise on some things to make the free service work for you. For example, many free sites don’t offer you your own domain name, but rather, your own sub-domain name, as in http://yourwebsitename.freewebhostprovider.com. Another factor to consider is that the free hosting services often come in at the bottom of search engine rankings, which could prevent a lot of traffic from getting to your site.

After you’ve been with a free hosting service for awhile, you may start feeling its limitations, which may include unprofessional looking layouts. Then, it may be time to purchase a domain name, a paid hosting plan and building your own pages that match to the “brand” you want your company to reflect.

We have done some investigating and provided a list of free hosts that have no banner ads here.