Free website host provider suggestions

tharpdevenport

Baseband Member
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Since 2004 I hosted a prominent website on 150m.com.


Over the recent years I have found it to become a frustrating experience. First there were garbage advertisers, ads that made code display incorrectly (or ads that had badly written code), but I learned to kind of accept that.


Then 150m.com started going down. It would go down without notice, for days or even a week, come back up and still not provide an explination. An internet search would show similar complaints from other users.


Now I've about reached the end. These passed five months, the provider has gone down for almost a month, and now it's been down for two months. I ping it, and I can still get a response from it, but it's not there (and yes, I have checked other site hsoted by them -- everything is down).


Three e-mails have gone ignored. Two to 150m.com and another to what I assume it the parent company, 0catch.com. The message board for users to ask and get answers, has not info' to help and you cant' even log in, so that's useless.


Right now my only hope, since I don't have all the pages backed up, is that the site will come back up since I can still ping it so it isn't gone yet. Even as a free user, they should care; people with paid sites that do commerce, are screwed; most of the sites have fallen out of a Google search (and Google cache's are going bye-bye, too), so even if they come back up tomorrow, other damage is being done; pages on the net that link to pages hosted on 150m.com, are being edited since it appears they dont' exist anymore, so that's a headache, too; and companies doing free advertising on 150m.com, aren't making any money. This goes beyond simply not responding to somebody with a free site.



So now I am on the hunt for antoher free website host provider. I only have time criteria, really:

  • I'm looking for a short-name provider. I hate these long wording site names that make your site look suspicious or take mroe to type. 150m was short.
  • And a provider that has an editor (that you don't have to download) that retains the code as you typed it. Before I used 150m.com, I had another host that saved all your HTML and it was jumbled togehter into one large un-readable paragraph.


The shortest one I found, 20m.com, was under consideration, but no longer. I tried to register with 20m.com, with no other choice on hand, but it turned out even though they advertise free web hosting on their site, there isn't any free web hosting on their site. It took me almost five minutes of a vicious loop to figure that out. It all leads back to the same page where you have to chose what plan you want and there is no free plan, only a $2.00 a month one. Even if I wasn't unemployed, I wouldn't plug two dollars a month into a provider that lies with false advertising.



Suggestions?
 
I used to use 000webhost.com before I started hosting myself. I finally quit them because they would delete your website if you didn't sign in to your account every few weeks. I forgot a few times and got tired of that.

As I recall, the service was fairly decent for a free host, though. There were some ads that showed up one time, and I just asked them in a support ticket to take them off and they did. Their control panel was pretty feature rich and actually worked, which is more than can be said for many.

not sure what they offer in terms of free subdomains, I used my own. Also, their service could have gone downhill by now, as free hosts often do. I'm not really sure.
 
000webhost.com were only recently updated to new servers and system, I couldn't get it to work with my own domain name last time so gave up. They were running PHP 5.2 for years and used to store passwords in plaintext, meaning that in 27 October 2015 the service was hacked and 13 million plaintext passwords were leaked.

My friend Rose (the same person who owns the forum I co-administrate), used freehost78.com, a free hosting service that uses DirectAdmin panel and offers quite good quality. They offer support via WHCMS panel, they usually respond within 24 hours.

Sorry for bumping an older thread but I wanted to put the word out there for others.
 
If you have knowledge to install server yourself, I would recommend using Google Cloud or Amazon AWS. They have free plan for one year, which allow users to create VPS and install server themselves.
 
I have a site hosted with www.turnkeyresellerhosting.com who do offer free hosting. They have ads in the control panel but not on your website. They had a few sub-domains you could choose from but i didn't pay much attention to what they were as I was using my own domain. I have been hosting the site with them for about 3 months now and not had any downtime as yet. My site is only low traffic though just a few hits per day so I don't know how you would get on if you had a busy site, guess they offer the free hosting to try and encourage people to upgrade to a paid plan
 
Free hosting providers are really good, but one day you can discover that they gone and You acn't retrieve your content back and all work will be wasted. I started recently with cloud computing for free (7 days) at everest.net. That is not a bout hosting - that is a bit different and at some extend can be considered as less expensive hosting alternative.
 
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