If you’re on this blog, you’re probably here because you’re a startup, new entrepreneur, beginner developer or web designer and looking for a starter hosting to test out your new website. You might not be ready to hire a developer yet, or you might be just getting around to learning web designing and development. That would mean that a better-known hosting like free wordpress hosting or the various other ones are too expensive for you and you’re not entirely sure yet if you should make that commitment. If any of that sounds familiar then you’re in the right place. There is the perfect hosting for you. Why? How about we start with the fact that it’s free but packs a huge list of features that will you give you most of what you’ll come to expect out of a full-fledged premium hosting.
Right out of the Box
Once you’ve signed up for the free plan of the hosting (click here to see the options), you get a myriad of features that seem surprising because of just how many features you’re getting without paying a buck. This article has been broken down into the features that will help you get a feel of what you get.
Building the Website
One of the most daunting tasks for most startup founders is that they mostly don’t come from a coding background or aren’t willing to jump ship with a full fledged developer. So how do you exactly build your own website without breaking your bank yet making the company go professional. 000webhost offers you three options to build your website.
These options are some of the best and easiest to use whether you’re a startup or with limited technical knowledge and also if you have intermediate to advanced development skills. The Easy Website Builder: This is the feature where you’ll be picking from their handful collection of templates, according to your own need. After you have a basic outlook, you can edit the look further with drag and drop options on to the website. For example, dragging the Youtube option, or the header to the left or right of the website. So you can build a website with minimal effort and without any real coding skills.
Wordpress: If you’re a Wordpress veteran, you’ll be right at home there. You can build your site from ground up with your custom URL and also create your own child pages within the parent one. You can create your own options with this mode of website building. If you’re comfortable with the WordPress backend, you’ll have no trouble with this mode of website building.
Direct Upload: Direct uploading is the most complex of the three since this means that your website is actually already hosted on a different platform from where you have to save it and reupload it onto this hosting. This is only recommended if you know what you’re doing we wouldn’t suggest this option for the beginners unless you really want to go all out with experimentation.
Does all of this sound unnerve to you? There’s no need to worry. Just as soon as you sign up, you’ll be asked what level of expertise you have with websites so that you can determine your pace and depending on what you pick, there are very well explained guidelines to help you set up the whole website with almost no development skills.
2. Space and Uptime
Within the free plan of 000webhost, you’re getting a stupendous 1000MB disk space and a bandwidth of 10GB. That’s enough space and bandwidth for most companies, particularly small and middle scaled ones. It also provides 2 free domains in the free plan. These are plenty for a beginner web developer to start with. And not only that, you get a 99% uptime, as understood from other reviews as well as from our own experience.
3. PHP and MySQL
000webhost has already hosted over 17 million websites at the time of writing. This staggering number might be explained by the many perks the hosting provides. For example, the hosting has full support of not just one, but two scripting languages- PHP and MySQL database. So if you have your expertise or lack thereof in any, you always have the other to fall back on. This super duo almost enables a very large number of options about what you want your site to be like or even how you want to build it. You also get two databases with the free account, and there are no limitations to the size. PHP also helps auto send emails.
4. Support
If you’re starting the site building or migration, it’s very common to get stuck in the process, be it any hosting you’re using. How do you solve your problems? With the support team of the hosting provider. While the free plan doesn’t allow direct support per se, they have a very interactive forum that has most of the FAQs that you may require answers to. You can find most of your answers to most of your questions, but if the existing conversation on the forum falls short to answer your question, you can always post your own or even better, head over to their website and use their LIVE chat to post your query. If the forum, the live chat or google isn’t your thing, the website also natively provides a very large database of FAQs to help you out, along with a full guide to WordPress integration, if that’s what you’re looking for. Oh and the best part? If English is not your native language, they have taken into consideration their multilingual users as well by having help/support forums in French and Spanish too. So that’s a plus.
5. Website Management
How do you get around the website? cPanel!
For those of you who don’t know what cPanel is, it is one of the easiest forms of website and file management for noobs who aren’t trying to get hands-on with the hard coding. What this does is it allow you to manage your assets, namely your database, email addresses, backups, FTP accounts as well as other files through a user-friendly web page that doesn’t require vast knowledge in coding or backend, just the ability to browse. 000webhost got your mail necessities covered perfectly. It also entails over 100 auto-install scripts.
6. Email Support
It wouldn’t be the most professional for anyone out there with their own company or gig to not have their own customized email address, isn’t it? Here’s the kicker, you get 5 free emails with even the free account. So if your company is called xyz, you can easily set up an email with [email protected], which is far better and more professional than having a generic one. These emails support webmail, POP3, SMTP, spam filtering, auto-responding etc. They also have the option to send emails to everyone who signs up to your website registry.
7. Ad Support
You get to run your own ads even with the free plan, including AdSense, which is insane if you’re trying to figure out how best to monetize your blog. This feature gives you the perfect hands-on experience with that. What’s better is that you also get no third-party ads on your website.
