If you want to run a self-hosted website on WordPress, you must need both domain and hosting service. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to pay for hosting as there are a couple of amazing sites that offer free web hosting. While you don’t necessarily have to spend hundreds of dollars on hosting (yes, you should be spending more money on hosting if your business is already making sales online) as there are few free options available for you to start your WordPress site or portfolio site or dummy sites. So in this post, let’s talk about some of the best free web hosting sites that you can use to start your WordPress sites. The good thing is that, you can later migrate to better managed hosting choices once your site starts generating income. Are you curious to find out the best free web hosting sites for 2023? Let’s jump into the details.
6 Best Free Web Hosting Sites to Use In 2023
Quick note: Before going into the details of best free web hosting services you can use in 2023, we want to clarify you one thing that the list mentioned here is in no particular order. That means, 5th or 10th hosting choice mentioned on this list can be as good as the 1st one.
1. Hostinger
Hostinger is an excellent choice if you’re looking for free hosting options from a trusted hosting company. Hostinger offers a forever-free plan which is great for absolute beginners.
Features of Hostinger Free Web Hosting
How to get started with Hostinger Free hosting?
To avail of free web hosting from Hostinger, visit this special link (if you’re from India). If you’re outside of India, visit this link to grab their free hosting. Once you’re on their website, click on the “Free Website Hosting” option to grab their free hosting.
Pros of Hostinger
Cons of Hostinger
Does Hostinger offer paid hosting?
Yes, Hostinger offers paid hosting and its pricing plans start at $1.89 per month where you get essential hosting features like;
Verdict about Hostinger
Hostinger is a reputed web hosting company that was founded in 2011 and is used by millions of customers to host their websites. Read: Hostinger Coupon Code 2023: Up to 90% Discount + Free DomainRead: Hostinger Hosting Review 2023: Should You Host Your Website with Them?
2. Freehosting.com
If you’re looking for a hosting service to host your website free for lifetime, Freehosting.com is a great choice for you. The great thing about using this platform is that you don’t have to give any of your credit card details to create a free account with them.
Features of Freehosting.com
Here’s a list of all the features that you get with freehosting.com:
How to get started with freehosting.com?
Click here to visit their free hosting page and click on Sign Up for Free button to continue, then you’ll need to enter your domain details (you’ll have to purchase a domain if you don’t have one already). If you already have a domain, you can choose your existing domain option to continue. Here’s how it looks like; In the next page, it will give you several addons (you can simply ignore them) to get free hosting from them. Enter details or you can also sign up using your Facebook credentials to create a free account with them. That’s it!
Pros of freehosting.com
Cons of freehosting.com
Does freehosting.com offer paid hosting?
Yes, freehosting.com also offers paid hosting where you can create unlimited sites with a ton of other useful features that are missing in free hosting plan. The features in the paid hosting include: Their paid hosting costs you $7.99 per month and $79 when you pay for 1 year at once.
Verdict about freehosting.com
It is a great choice for bloggers especially the beginners who want to start a self-hosted WordPress site for free. You just need to buy a domain name (which doesn’t cost you more than $10 a year) and you’re all set to start blogging!
3. Infinity Free
Infinity Free is one of the few free best web hosting sites that offers “unlimited disk space and bandwidth” for free to all its customers. It is also one of the oldest free hosting platforms that’s offering free hosting since 2011.
Features of Infinty Free
How to get started with Infinity Free hosting?
Click here to visit their website and click on Sign Up Now button which looks something like this; On the next page, you’ll need to enter your details such as name and email to create a free hosting account with them. You can register your own domain name with them or you can use your existing domain to host on their servers for free.
Pros of Infinity Free
Cons of Infinity Free
Does it offer paid hosting?
Yes, it also offers paid hosting which gives you 24/7/365 Customer Support along with additional features such as: Their pricing starts at $3.99 per month.
Verdict about Infinity Free
InfinityFree is an independent hosting platform which is serving people with reliable free hosting since 2011. It is a great pick for people who want a better free hosting choice that gives less troubles.
4. HyperHost
HyperHost offers free hosting along with SSD storage to help you build faster loading websites at completely free of cost (with few strings attached). We’ll discuss about them below.
Features of HyperHost
How to get started with Hyper Host?
Unlike other hosting companies, HyperHost has some strings attached to it and you should match the criteria in order to get free SSD storage hosting from them. To get service for free your website should needs;
The number of unique visitors should be higher than 100 users per day The site should not be under DDoS attack
That means you should already have a pre-built website or blog that should get at least 100 visitors a day to qualify for free hosting from HyperHost. If your website matches with that criteria, you can use this page to create free hosting with them. In case if your website doesn’t match that criteria, you can buy hosting from them that starts at $1 per month.
Pros of HyperHost
Cons of HyperHost
Does HyperHost offer paid hosting?
Yes, it also offers paid hosting and you can get special features like;
Daily backups Unlimited bandwidth SSD storage Free CDN and many more
Their price starts at $1 per month.
Verdict about HyperHost
If you’ve a pre-built website that’s getting 100+ visitors a day and looking for a free hosting provider that offers SSD storage, Hyper Host is exclusively for you!
5. AwardSpace.com
If you’re looking for a free hosting along with a free short domain which gives you access to PHP, MySQL, App Installer, Email Sending etc, AwardSpace.com is definitely a great choice for all the beginners. The best part is it doesn’t use any forced ads on the sites that are hosted on their platform.
Features of AwardSpace.com
How to get started with AwardSpace.com?
Click here to join Award Space hosting environment and sign up for a free account to start your blog on a self-hosted platform like WordPress. As you can see above, you can either use your Facebook details or Google+ details to create a free account on this platform.
Pros of AwardSpace.com
Cons of AwardSpace.com
Does AwardSpace.com offer paid hosting?
Yes, besides free hosting plans, they also offer premium hosting services that start at $1 per month for the people who need more features for their websites and the features include the following.
Verdict about AwardSpace.com
According to their website, Award Space hosting is used by over 2.5 million people worldwide which says a lot about how popular their hosting is. So if you’re looking for a free hosting choice that’s used by a lot of people, go for their hosting services.
6. 50Webs
50Webs is one of the finest web hosting sites that gives you enough disk space and storage where you can actually host up to 10 websites without paying a single penny for their hosting.
Features of 50Webs
How to get started with 50Webs hosting?
You can use this page to create a free hosting account on 50Webs hosting platform and you will need to pick your duration (usually 12 months) along with a data center where you want to host your website and other details such as domain name. Here’s how it looks like;
Pros of 50Webs
Cons of 50Webs
Does it offer paid hosting?
Yes, it also offers premium hosting plans starting at $2 per month where you can get useful features like more disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, priority support etc.
Verdict about 50Webs
Their free plan offers enough features for you to maintain a self-hosted WordPress site effortlessly. So it’s a great choice especially for people who are looking for better hosting plans for free.
Must Have: Domain Name From NameCheap
If you’ve gone through the above list best free web hosting services, you will observe that you need to domain name to point to these hosting platforms. So you have to spend $10 per year (that’s the max) for registering a domain name. If you don’t want to spend even $10, you can get free domains with .tk, .nf etc extensions. Just Google about the free domain registrars and you’ll be able to find a plenty of them. But we highly recommend you to spend $10 or so to register your domain name on a reputed and reliable companies like NameCheap. Click here to purchase domain from NameCheap Once you’re done with domain name registration, you can use any of the above mentioned hosting sites to instantly start your website for free. Recommended: Namecheap promo codes to save more on Hosting & Domain purchase
Pros and Cons of Free Web Hosting
Free web hosting comes with both pros and cons. So you should better be cautious before thinking about starting a WordPress site on any of free hosting sites.
5 benefits of using free hosting sites
- No need to pay anything As the name suggests, free hosting platforms give you access to their hosting servers for free. You don’t have to pay even a penny. You don’t also have to enter your credit card details. So especially for students who don’t have any access to credit cards but still want to start a professional website on platforms like WordPress, the free hosting services mentioned here are great.
- You can start a self-hosted site If people are looking for free sites, they usually start a blogspot or WordPress.org (free platform) to create a blog. But they don’t give you full control over your sites. If you want to launch a self-hosted WordPress site, you need both domain and hosting. Here’s where free hosting sites come to rescue where you just need to grab a domain name (there are also free domain name registrars available) and point it to the hosting services that you get from hosting sites.
- Great for students and portfolio sites If you’re a student, chances are you’ve limited budget or no access to credit cards to buy hosting to start a WordPress site. Free hosting providers don’t ask for credit card information so it’s mostly useful for students who want to get started in blogging. You can also create portfolio sites to showcase your writing, designing or other skills to market your business.
- Start for free, migrate later (once you make money) The good thing about using free hosting sites in the beginning is that it allows you to start professional blogging for free. Once you’ve find ways to make money from blogging, you can later move on to premium hosting sites like WPX hosting which are superior in value and worth every single penny.
- Not all free hosting sites are bad Most people avoid free hosting sites because they think they are all rotten and kind of spammy but the reality is those days are gone where free hosting platforms doing the gimmicks. Now there are so many reliable hosting sites that are not depending upon ads or linkbacks but giving better hosting for free.
5 reasons to avoid free web hosting sites
- Limited or no customer support There’s no reason for a hosting company to spend extra money on giving customer support especially for free hosting accounts. It simply costs them a lot and most hosting sites can’t afford to have it. So you are on your own if you need any help with free hosting sites.
- Frequent downtime issues Free hosting services are used by just too many people which means they are all using the same shared hosting environment causing frequent downtime issues which also leads to slow website loading times. If you’re looking for faster websites and better search engine rankings, you should definitely either go for SSD based hosting or dedicated hosting choices and definitely avoid free hosting services.
- Limited or zero security Another reason to avoid free hosting providers is that they don’t give high end security or malware protection or 24/7 monitoring to detect any hacking attacks or malware attacks so you should take care of your site’s security on your own. Taking care of your website security is a big problem as thousands of websites get hacked every single day – so you should avoid using free hosting sites just for this one reason.
- Mostly unreliable and your site may disappear at anytime What happens if a free hosting service provider decides to shut down their operations all of a sudden? You never know when they are going to disappear or out of the free hosting game which puts the future of your websites in trouble. So if you’re really serious about making money from websites, avoid free web hosting sites.
- Too many ads While there are still a couple of best free web hosting sites that don’t use any forced ads on your site but majority of them still find ways to show their hosting ads or get links from your somehow. So if you don’t want to display any forced ads from the hosting company that you use, you should definitely go for premium hosting sites and avoid free hosting sites. Although the list of hosting companies mentioned here are mostly ad-free so pick them wisely. Browse more Blogging Tutorials:
How to Start a Free Blog on Blogspot & Make Money List of Free Blog Sites for Creating Personal Blogs Best Free Online Punctuation Checker Tools for Bloggers Free Ways to Get More Exposure, Traffic and Subscribers to Your Blog Best Free Ways to Estimate Traffic of Any Website First Month Free Hosting Websites
Final Thoughts
When I started Bloggers Passion in 2010, there were not too many free hosting services out there which are credible. But now in 2023, there are so many credible web hosting platforms that are genuinely offering free hosting services to the people (that’s a great change). There are also so many best web hosting affiliate programs out there to help you make money. All the free web hosting services mentioned on this page are selected carefully so just go through the features of each one of them to pick the right one for your choice. Did we miss any of your favourite free web hosting sites in the list? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
