Free Web Hosting

Free Web Hosting? Whats the catch? Well, poor customer service and low monthly bandwidth usage are two issues. There are two ways hosting companies subsidize 'free hosting'. The first is to display adverts (banners, textlinks, popups, etc) on your page (does not present a good image). The second is to charge high prices for your domain name and high fees to transfer away.

We are happy with our Web Hosts, but to write a proper review we bought some domain names and hosted them with various 'Free Web Hosts'. Below you can find our reviews. In summary if you are on a tight budget and dont expect many visitors a Free Host may be suitable. But for any Business site, we strongly suggest you find a good host. We had problems with a host making one of our sites offline for 3 days and it made our site appear unreliable to the Search Engines. We got delisted for a month until the next 'Indexing' and it cost us around 150,000 hits.

Free Web Hosts Reviewed

freevirtualservers.com Full specification hosting, free for life. No adverts, no banners, no pop-ups. With Free Virtual Servers, free hosting means free hosting, for life, with no hidden costs or charges. Whilst other companies can only dream of offering this, we deliver this to thousands of customers every year, with features worth hundreds of pounds. Web Space 100mb Bandwidth per Month 100mb Email Accounts 10 + a MySQL database.

In our opinion, not the best. But it may be suitable for you. 7/10

x9internet.com Although not a free host they are so cheap we thought we would list them. We got a Mini Virtual Server (multi domains) hosting package for Ł9 a year. With all these features; Disk Space Quota: 100Mb Monthly Bandwidth Quota: 1000Mb POP accounts: 50 MySQL Databases: 5 Scripting: Perl, PHP FTP accounts: 25. You can also host 20 Domains with this account and you can also create upto 20 subdomains. It even includes Frontpage Extensions. We had a couple of teething troubles, but they replied quickly.

In our opinion, the best option. The domain names were amongst the cheapest available. 9/10

freeola and getdotted Freeola / Getdotted Their sales pitch goes... You can have your free web space package at any domain name (e.g. www.example.com) purchased through, or transferred to, GetDotted.com. But it's a scam. We paid Ł19.96 for a .com name for 2 years, so we could benefit from their 'free hosting'. The hosting may be free but you have to pay Ł3 per month to upload files. Their customer service is poor as well.

In our opinion, one to avoid. 1/10

Lycos Lycos Create your personal homepage with just a few clicks. Tripod is completely for free! Now with 1024MB storage and PHP5. Features include: PHP5, MySQL, FTP, WebFTP, Guestbook, Feedback Forms, Counter, Statistics, Polls. Your site will contain pop-ups etc which annoy visitors. Ideal for your family photo's or link farms. Many people started off with sites hosted this way and it is 100% free.

In our opinion, it has its uses. 7/10

Disclaimer; details correct at time of writing and based on our experiences with these companies.