Andy Crawford

Website Hosting Packages come with a variety of features and scripts already installed on the server, so to a certain extent, you get what you pay for. The more features and services, the more disk space and the more bandwidth allowed, the more the website hosting package is likely to cost.

It would not be possible to run a large or secure website on a free website hosting package but I am often asked if it is possible to get web hosting for free. The answer is yes, so long as a) you know what you are doing and, b) you are prepared to register your own domain name and configure the domain and the webspace yourself. Perhaps not for the inexperienced wannabe web designer but for those with experience of the installation and set up of websites, it would not be too complex to do.

As a test, I have tried one such free web hosting provider: http://www.000webhost.com/

The service is limited. I had some issues with some PHP scripts being disabled on the free account and I have not tested all the features fully yet. I suspect that if I were to try to go much above a very basic website installation I would start running in to brick walls with the only option to be to upgrade to a premium account.

They offer 1500mb of disk space with two MySQL databases available. Uptime is above 99% and the server runs on Apache/UNIX, so overall, it’s does the job.

Time will tell how reliable the service is, but so long as you remember that you get what you pay for, you can’t really go wrong with something for free.

Unless that is, you invest a lot of time and effort into building something and then losing it and having to start over again.