000webhost Review - is this free option worth it?
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Our Experts Opinions 
*Rating Based on our Experience |
Customer Experiences Reliability Pricing User Friendly Support Features |
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Over the last few years, 000webhost has become a leader in providing excellent web hosting services with no hidden costs and advertising. If you have ever typed “free web hosting” in a search engine, chances are that the name of this provider has come up. Usually, when you want free web hosting, you have to live with the downside of advertisements littered all over your website. But with 000webhost, this is not the case.
Naturally, there is a limit to what you can do with a free hosting plan, but this way, you can create a blog or a website and place your own advertisements with no upfront cost! 000 web host was started in 2007 with an aim to provide free web hosting for everyone, and since then has been giving tough competition to industry stalwarts. Its parent company is Hostinger, which has over 29 million users in 178 countries. It also claims that they get a new client every 5 seconds!
The company suffered a major security breach in October 2015 when one of their servers comprising their database was hacked, resulting in theft of information of over 13.5 million clients. The theft was blamed on outdated software, and the company moved quickly to plug the leak. The company has been very candid about this incident and to this date maintains a page explaining what exactly happened and what security measures were taken for further prevention.
In this review of 000webhost, we will take a look at some of their services, prices, customer support and other features.
Review of Customer Support:
The folks at 000webhost.com claim that their daily task is to serve millions of free hosting users, and they keep a keen eye on the needs of their customers, and manage them on the basis of the latest technologies. They are part of the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and are considered a trusted web hosting company.
The company has made it easy for their customers to reach their support team:
Forum/Blog
The company has a very active forum which has categories such as community support, site showcase, website building, tutorials (on over a 100 topics such as adding comments to your website, tracking visitors, securing a WordPress site and so on) and has Spanish and German versions of this forum as well.
They also have a blog which is maintained regularly and covers topics such as Git basics or the best place to learn website development.
Knowledge Base
000webhost has an extensive knowledge base for a free hosting service, which has an extended FAQ section covering basic topics such as resetting your account, to complex technical ones. The knowledge base also has a search field where you can look for a specific topic of your choice. Upon looking in the “security” section of the site to review how exntesive it is, we were pleased to find many search results pertaining to this query.
The knowledgebase often links to articles from BitDegree, an online education provider that claims to have 3 million page views per month and a clientele of over 50,000 students.
As of now, 000webhost does not have live chat support.
Is Uptime a concern with 000webhost?
According to the company, 000webhost’s customers enjoy uninterrupted uptime. The company does not display a 99.9% uptime promise on their page, this support page says that they guarantee at least 99% uptime. They have a paid website monitoring service that monitors every minute from multiple locations worldwide.
They also provide a server status update page, which shows quick statistics such as overall uptime and latest downtime. If this page is to be believed, one can see that their uptime is pretty good and barring a few instances, it’s mostly at 100% although it is their own tracking which shows that so we can't never be sure they're upfront about it.
In our review of 000webhost we did find that they try to get you to upsell with a Hostinger package but that's not something we should be too concerned about as this is a business after all.
Key Features of 000 web host:
Let's look into some of the main features while doing this 000webhost comparison:
Absolutely Free Hosting
This provider believes that access to the internet is a fundamental human right and wants to give its customers the power to be heard. The company says that they provide their customers all the tools to start your business, make a portfolio or a personal blog absolutely free. We will read more about the free stuff in the pricing plans.
Easy-to-Use Control Panel
Users have access to an easy-to-use and elegant control panel that makes it easier for the user to manage their website. You can easily optimize, manage and promote your website using the control panel that is provided with the account.
1-Click WordPress Installer
These days a lot of providers are supplying a 1-click installer for free and 000webhost is no exception. This means that you can install WordPress or any other script easily with just a simple click.
Free Domain Hosting
This is self-explanatory. The company allows you to host your WordPress sites on their domain.
No Advertisements on 000webhost?
If you have used a free service before, you are probably aware that you will have an advertisement-laden environment which would negate the purpose of your personal blog or website if you are selling your own product. Unless it serves your purpose, your blog/website should feature only your advertisements and not that of third parties.
With 000webhost, you get your own controlled environment and freedom to do your own thing without the burdensome advertisements.
Great Bandwidth
A free hosting provider giving you 10GB of bandwidth? That is rather unheard of! It is common for other providers to cap the bandwidth so that the user has no choice but to upgrade. Such bandwidth is not even good for a basic blog, but 000webhost provides their free users ample bandwidth that is suitable even for small businesses.
Pricing Plans Comparison
By now, it should be quite obvious that 000webhost translates to $0.00 web hosting service and their free plan involves no cost at all and the fact that millions have availed of this service is proof enough. Apart from this, the company also provides premium hosting services such as shared, VPS and cloud hosting at minimal prices. If you have a small business and you don't have a big budget to invest in your website then this would be the best free hosting provider you can start with.
Web Hosting Plans Reviewed
The company offers its users 3 great plans.
- Free: For absolutely no cost, you get no script auto installer, 2 websites, limited 1GB space, 10GB bandwidth, a free website builder (with 100s of free templates), (almost) unrestricted PHP support, monthly data backups, FTP support, MySQL databases, instant activation, password-protected directories, WordPress hosting service and others. Do note that this does not include live support, email service or backups.
- Single: At a price of $0.80 (at 90% off, the price was earlier $7.99), you get 10GB space, 100GB bandwidth, 1 website, 200MB mailbox size, $100 worth of free learning courses, software auto installer with 50 scripts, weekly data backups, 30-day money back guarantee, free website builder (with 100s of free templates), (almost) unrestricted PHP support, FTP support, MySQL databases, instant activation, password-protected directories, WordPress hosting and other services.
- Premium: At a price of $2.15 (at 82% off, the price was earlier $11.95), you get unlimited space, bandwidth, websites, 10GB mailbox size, $100 worth of free learning courses, software auto installer with more than 90 scripts, weekly data backups, 30-day money back guarantee, free website builder (with 100s of free templates), (almost) unrestricted PHP support, FTP support, MySQL databases, instant activation, password-protected directories, WordPress hosting and other services.
With the paid plans, you also get an email accounts manager, database backup and restore, DNS zone editor, 24/7 priority support and support via ticket, webmail access, spam filters, advanced CRON jobs and many other services.
Shared Hosting
This is a user friendly and affordable solution that is perfect for medium websites and has premium web features. They have 3 plans.
In comparison to other hosting providers out there 000 web host is doing a suprisingly good job at offering a very well suited package at literally $0.00.
While they do offer a free package they also have paid options so let's continue with this 000webhost review by comparing their pricing plans:
- Single Shared Hosting: For a starting price of $0.80 (at 90% off, the price was originally $7.99), you get 1 website, 1 email account, 100GB bandwidth, 1x memory and processing power, 10GB SSD storage space, 1 MySQL database, an easy website builder (with 100s of free templates), 99.9% uptime guarantee, a powerful control panel and 24/7/365 support among other features.
- Premium Shared Hosting: For a starting price of $2.15 (at 82% off, the price was originally $11.95), you get unlimited websites, email accounts, bandwidth, 2x memory and processing power, unlimited SSD storage space and MySQL databases, SSH access, free domain registration, an easy website builder (with 100s of free templates), 99.9% uptime guarantee, a powerful control panel and 24/7/365 support among other features.
- Business Shared Hosting: For a starting price of $3.45 (at 78% off, the price was originally $15.95), you get all the benefits of the Premium package, 4x memory and processing power, daily backups, free SSL certificate, hotlink protection and many others.
To fit your needs perfectly, all business and premium plans come with unmetered bandwidth and SSD disk space for you to be able to host any type of website successfully. 000webhost also get free SSL certificates for better security and the ability to operate customer’s data without any worries related to security.
Cloud Hosting
You can take advantage of 000webhost’s cloud services and experience up to 3 times faster hosting; it is like having your own dedicated server. The backend is handled by a team of professionals, so you don’t have to.
The company promises to include any technological advances and performance updates as soon as they are available. They offer 3 plans.
- Startup: Starting at $7.45 per month (with a saving of 74%, the plan otherwise costs $29), the plan offers you unlimited websites, 3GB RAM, 40GB SSD storage, 2 CPU cores and unlimited bandwidth. All resources are managed and used exclusively by you. The plan comes with free domain registration for the first year, a free dedicated IP, a free SSL certificate (for your website’s protection), daily backups, 1-click installer, multiple PHP versions, unlimited email accounts, access manager, 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7/365 support among other features.
- Professional: Starting at $14.95 per month (with a saving of 74%, the plan otherwise costs $58), the plan offers you unlimited websites, 6GB RAM, 80GB SSD storage, 4 CPU cores and unlimited bandwidth. You also get 2x optimized performance and increased speed. The plan also comes with free domain registration for the first year, a free dedicated IP, a free SSL certificate (for your website’s protection), daily backups, 1-click installer, multiple PHP versions, unlimited email accounts, access manager, 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7/365 support among other features.
- Enterprise: Starting at $14.95 per month (with a saving of 79%, the plan otherwise costs $130), the plan offers a dedicated IP address, unlimited websites, 12GB RAM, 160GB SSD storage, 6 CPU cores and unlimited bandwidth. You also get 2x optimized performance and increased speed. The plan also comes with free domain registration for the first year, a free dedicated IP, a free SSL certificate (for your website’s protection), daily backups, 1-click installer, multiple PHP versions,unlimited email accounts, access manager, 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7/365 support among other features.
With cloud hosting, you get instant server setup so you can get your boots on the ground in no time, a cache manager to make your websites super fast, automated backups to ensure there is no data loss and an innovative control panel so you can find all your essential tools in one place.
Security Features
As we mentioned earlier in this 000webhost review, the company has faced security issues in the past, but since then, they have come a long way. For instance, all accounts include DDoS protection to prevent the most malicious attacks by suppressing excessive malicious traffic.
Mod Security
This is an Apache module that helps protect the website from various attacks by blocking the most commonly used exploits such as injection attacks.
Suhosin PHP Hardening
This is a protection system for PHP installations, and protects the known and unknown flaws in such applications. Because of their previous security issues they have taken a very proactive approach in making sure their web security is top notch.
More information on 000webhost security is available here.
Pros and Cons
At The Hosting Institute we've reviewed more 30+ hosting companies so far and by now we can say that most of them have a lot of advantages but some of them also lack in basic features. Now let's look at some of the ups and downs that come with a free web hosting provider:
Pros
- 9% guarantee, and they even have a server status page where you can check for the latest updates regarding the same.
- A free website builder that is feature rich and has many templates to choose from.
- Absolutely no annoying ads let you have a free rein on your website with the freedom to put up your own advertisements.
- Free plans are absolutely free with no hidden costs for basic features.
- Free cPanel to manage and maintain the aspects of your website.
- Multi-language support for a global audience.
Cons
- Lack of live chat is not appreciated by a majority of users.
- Some customers have complained of slow page loads.
Conclusion
If you're looking in 2020 for 000webhost reviews then I hope this one helped you out and this hosting company is definitely a good place to start.
Compared with other free service providers, 000webhost provides a lot more in terms of features and essential services. Their services are free for life once you decide to go with them and come with no hidden costs. The free option makes it ideal for those who are venturing into the business and students who are still experimenting with different web hosts.
If you are looking for a feature-rich host with great customer support and high-end tools, 000webhost might not be for you, but if you are on a budget and looking to kick-off a new website, this could be the perfect choice for you.
