Best free web hosting providers 2017

The costs of setting up and maintaining a website can add up quickly. Designing, developing, and maintaining a site all need outlay of one sort or other and so it's important for businesses to minimize expenditure where they can

1. 000Webhost

Bandwidth: 100GB | Disk Space: 1.5GB | Ads: No | Panel: Cpanel | MySQL Databases: 2 | Website: 1 | E-mail accounts: 5 | Domain hosting: yes | FTP: Yes

Located in the US, 000Webhost has been providing free hosting services since 2007. Its free hosting service includes 1.5GB of space, 100GB of bandwidth per month and five accompanying email accounts. PHP and MySQL are supported with no restrictions and users are guaranteed 99% provable uptime as well as weekly backups.

The service is supported by donations from its community of users (nearly 14 million at the time of writing) and revenue generated from 000Webhost's premium hosting packages (24hosting). Starting at $2 per month, they aren't going to break the bank and give customers the option of moving to a more comprehensive plan should the need arise.

 

2. Freehostia

Bandwidth: 6GB | Disk Space: 250MB | Ads: No | Panel: Elefante | MySQL Databases: 1 | Website: 1 | E-mail accounts: 3 | Domain hosting: yes | FTP: No

Freehostia offers a number of different hosting tariffs with outlandish names like Lovebeat, Wildhoney and Supernatural. Its free plan, Chocolate, gives users 250MB disk space, 6GB bandwidth each month, PHP & MySQL compatibility and 3 POP3/IMAP email accounts. Server uptime is guaranteed at 99.9% and 24/7 user support is provided should any problems arise.

It even offers a surprisingly good 1-hour ticket/email response promise. Joomla, WordPress, phpBB and other PHP scripts can be installed with one-click using Freehostia's Elefante Installer and upgrading to any of the paid premium packages can also be done in one-click, should users outgrow the free plan.

3. FreeHosting.com

Bandwidth: 250GB | Disk Space: 10GB | Ads: No | Panel: Cpanel | MySQL Databases: 1 | Website: 1 | E-mail accounts: 1 | Domain hosting: yes | FTP: Yes

Of the free hosting providers convered in this article, Freehosting.com is the biggest hitter in terms of monthly bandwidth with a whopping 250GB data allowance provided. The service also includes 10GB of server space and one email account. For users without a domain name, free subdomains are also offered, such as freesubdomain.freehosting.com.

Economy and Deluxe packages are also available, both offering unlimited disk space and monthly transfer as well as unlimited email accounts. Freehosting is also one of the few to actively encourage using the hosting service to backup your important files (e.g one 10GB ZIP file), great as it doesn't have a limit for file sizes.