If you are on a tight budget or are unable to make an online payment for hosting or live in a high fraud risk country and so can’t get hosting then the only option available to you might be finding some good free hosting. However, before I continue I should say that paid hosting is preferable over free hosting any day.
So what are the free hosting options available to you?
1. Web Hosting Talk
This is a forum where webmasters and web host owners hang out. You will find that most of the web hosting owners are college students or entrepreneurs running this business as a side income, so what you have is a great concentration of web hosts who offer their services for free to try and get customers who will eventually upgrade to a paid service. The amount of space and bandwidth you get on these hosting accounts is likely to be very low, some don’t even let you install a database. The reliability will also be low and you still need to buy yourself a domain, although some do offer a subdomain option.
2. Weebly
Weebly is gaining some ground as a great place for free web hosting and to set up your site for free. They will give you a subdomain so your website address will become http://yourname.weebly.com which isn’t all that bad. They have a number of great options, loads of free templates, a site builder, blog options and more, although don’t expect the same level of flexibility as a regular hosting account, you don’t have FTP access to upload your own files. They claim that you can have unlimited bandwidth and use unlimited resources although I’m sure this is just marketing speak. The great thing is there are no adverts on your site.
3. Google Sites
Not many people know that Google offer free website hosting but they have a number of options for clubs, wiki’s, projects, company intranets, classrooms and even family websites. You will get a nice selection of templates and an online text editor to add your content. With the backing of Google you can be sure the site will have fantastic reliability and bandwidth will never be a problem! The downside is that your address won’t look too nice and is in the following format: http://sites.google.com/site/yournamehere/
4. Blogger
Blogger is also owned by Google and while technically you couldn’t call it free web hosting. The blog platform and ability to completely edit the template to your own design means it’s very flexible to accommodate your needs. There are no ads, you have unlimited storage and bandwidth and you won’t get shut down for using too many resources if your site becomes popular. Your web address is quite short too and will look like this: http://name.blogspot.com
5. Webs.com
This is one of the original sites that offered free web hosting and operates similar to Weebly. Although you can’t programme your own sites, they do have many options like blogs, forums, calendars, shopping carts and even social networking. They have hundreds of great templates to choose from too so getting your site online is pretty easy. You address will look like this: http://yourname.hostwebs.com