The two categories of free web hosting
As seen on a post of mine on freevps.us forum. Edited to join various posts in a coherent blog post.
Seriously, all the free shared and reseller hosting sucks. For every free hosting, there are two categories, A and B:
A – the host is good, gives you lots of things you wouldn’t get on many paid hosts: good CPanel, good support, fast speeds, support for lots of technologies (PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails, etc. etc.), automated installers and all the state-of-the-art things. You start creating a website and you’re successful with it, you get lots of visits, and you’re happy. But… some day, the host reduces the free plans, goes slow like hell, or worse, all the plans become paid and you must pay, or even worse, the host goes offline forever along with your site – and nobody explains you why!
B – The webhosting sucks completely from the first look: often their website makes it look like it’s a scam, and in fact it is. Slow speeds, overloaded servers, stupid FTP that doesn’t let you upload more than 1 file at once nor files bigger than few MBs, old PHP version with safe_mode on (that is, if you’re lucky enough to have PHP)… do I need to say anything else about this type of web hosts?
In my opinion, the type A is the worse: they make you create a good website, then after some months disappear leaving you without website and your visitors (or users) disappointed (or really mad).
I have tried for sure more than 50 free web hosts, and I can classify them all into one of these categories. The B type of free hosts is the most common, and they are also the ones which are online for more time (but that doesn’t mean good server uptime).
For a better classification of hosts in these two categories, the only hosts that can be classified as A or B must either have already died or have been around for more than two years. That means, for example, that you can’t use the A-B difference meter to classify HostingMotive, as it has been just created.
Soon, I’ll post a new classification scale that will also be able to classify free web hosts that have not already died and are not more than two years old, like recently created hosts and hosting project ideas (yes, because we can also classify the ideas). Stay tuned!
Robert H.
September 3, 2016 - 07:27
Hey,
Would you share some “A” type of free web hosting.