Free web hosting — what you get for nothing and what leaves with the provider

"I want a website, but can I put it up for nothing?" — we hear that regularly, and the answer is: yes, you can; it is worth knowing what you pay with instead. Because you always pay. Just not by invoice.

This is not a list of the best free hosts. Such lists have an expiry date, and below is why — told through three platforms those lists recommended as safe bets, all three of which disappeared inside three years. Instead of names you get the mechanism: what to check in any free offer, and where the risk is acceptable.

What free hosting is and how it works

Free hosting is space on a server where a site sits at no charge, on the provider's terms. Imagine being given free floor space inside somebody else's shopping centre: the space is real, but you do not decide the fit-out, the opening hours, or whose advertising hangs in your unit.

The defining traits, briefly:

• No cost — you do not pay for server space, and that is the entire advantage the model exists for.
• Limited resources — little space, transfer caps, parts of the server's functionality missing.
• No real control — advertising, performance and whether you can attach your own domain are the provider's decisions, not yours.
• Risk of data loss — regular backups are rarely part of a free plan.

What is free regardless of hosting

Worth separating out, because two things often bought separately cost nothing wherever the site sits.

An SSL certificate comes free from Let's Encrypt. Cloudflare gives a universal certificate, a CDN and DDoS protection on its free plan — the application firewall starts on Pro and an availability SLA only on Business, so those are the lines you would eventually pay for, not encryption. Uptime monitoring has a free tier too: UptimeRobot checks a site every five minutes at no charge.

The practical conclusion: if your problem is a certificate or monitoring, free hosting is not the answer — those things are free on paid hosting as well.

What free hosting gives, and what it does not

It gives three things, all real:

• Zero cost — testing an idea or putting up a simple brochure page, the absence of an invoice changes something.
• Easy setup — many free platforms are builders, where a site appears without any knowledge of code.
• A fast start — finding out whether anyone asks requires no investment.

It does not give five, and those are real too:

• Performance. Free accounts run at lower priority than paid ones on the same machine. A few seconds to load is not a fault, it is how the plan works.
• Freedom from advertising. Most free plans attach the provider's scripts to your site, and you have no say in whose advert it is. On the vendors' own pages: Weebly sells "Remove Square Ads" as an upgrade, and Infomaniak's free tier carries a "mandatory display of Infomaniak's advertising message".
• Support. When something stops working there is a knowledge base and a forum. Nobody to call, and no deadline.
• Visibility. A slow server and a subdomain inside somebody else's domain are a worse start in search — not through a penalty, but because you build rank on an address that is not yours.
• Your own domain. Not one free tier we read includes one. Wix states it plainly: "connecting a custom domain requires upgrading to a plan".

Why every "best free hosting" list has an expiry date

Such round-ups share one flaw, and it has nothing to do with the author's diligence: they describe the state of play on the day of publication, and a service with no subscription revenue has nothing to fund its own continued existence with. That is not a prediction. In the last three years three platforms those lists recommended as safe have closed.

The first case was documented by the provider itself: Hostinger closed 000WebHost after seventeen years, new sign-ups ended on 8 July 2024, the full shutdown followed on 14 October, and users had until 12 August to download files and databases (Hostinger's announcement). The address now redirects to a paid offer. If you have found a guide that still recommends it, that guide is older than it looks.

The common factor matters more than the dates: in each case the user got a few weeks to move, and moving a site built inside somebody else's builder usually means building it again. So when you count the saving, add to the "€0" the probability that in two years you will give this site a week of work — on a deadline somebody else set.

Four things to check in any free offer

Since names go stale, what is left is criteria. These four questions can be put to any provider, and each has an answer in the terms of service or in the control panel — not in the marketing.

1. Is the SSL certificate free, or a forced paid extra? Let's Encrypt costs nothing, so a provider selling you a certificate for a free plan is selling something free elsewhere. First signal about the rest of the price list.

2. Does the provider attach scripts to your site? A minute's work: open the page source and look for scripts you did not put there. Adverts are sometimes announced in the terms and sometimes described only in general words. The code does not equivocate.

3. Can you take a full export? A MySQL dump and a file archive, yourself, from the panel, without a ticket. This is the one thing that decides what leaving costs you, and the one whose absence turns "free" into "irreversible". Check it before you upload content, not in the week a shutdown is announced.

4. Do the terms permit commercial use? Some free plans forbid it outright. A company site on such a plan runs until the first review or the first report — with no appeal, because you agreed to it at sign-up.

What to do when a provider announces a shutdown

Since it happens, it helps to have an order — because in all three cases in the table the window was a few weeks, and most of that time went on hunting for a new provider instead of rescuing what already existed.

Backup first, decisions after. On day one, download the database dump, the file archive and a list of the URLs of every page. The third is most often skipped, and without it you cannot set up redirects later and you lose whatever the site earned in search. A panel export does not include it — walk the menu and write them down.

Then the content, in a form usable elsewhere. Text into a document, images at original resolution. If the site was built in the provider's builder you will not move the layout anyway — only what can be copied, and the earlier you do it, the less happens under pressure.

The domain last. If you own one, repointing it at a new server is a DNS change and the site returns at the same address. If you were on the provider's subdomain, the old address disappears for good with the service and cannot be redirected from — the line item nobody mentioned at sign-up.

The order is the opposite of the intuitive one, and that is the point: choosing new hosting is easy and can be done any time. Downloading your data can only be done while the service still runs.

The "free domain and hosting" trap

The phrase appears often in offers and almost always means something other than what it appears to mean. What is free is an address inside the provider's domain — a subdomain such as yourcompany.freehost.net — not a domain you could call your own.

Three consequences, all commercial rather than technical:

• Impression. Somebody else's name inside your address shows everywhere the address appears: in search results, in an email signature, on an invoice.
• A brand you are not building. Every visit, link and mention works on the recognisability of the provider's domain, not yours.
• Traffic you cannot take with you. The expensive part. The position a site earns under a subdomain does not transfer when you move to your own address — you start from zero with a year or two behind you.

Free domain extensions as an alternative have ceased to exist. Freenom issued .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf and .gq for nothing; it suspended registrations in 2023 after Meta sued over cybersquatting, and left the domain business in 2024 — .ml reverted to Mali, .ga was taken over by France's Afnic. In July 2026 Freenom returned with three extensions, but as a paid service, from €8.22 a year (Domain Incite).

For comparison, what an address of your own costs: Strato renews a .de at €1.00 a month and a .com at €1.80, Gandi a .com at €31.98 a year. The smallest line in the whole project. Its full breakdown is separate.

Free hosting and WordPress

If you are planning WordPress, a free plan stops being a matter of convenience and becomes a matter of whether the site will work at all. Three things break most often, and all three are predictable in advance.

PHP memory. WordPress tries to raise the memory limit itself — its documentation states that it reaches for 40 MB for a single site and 64 MB for multisite by default. A real installation with a theme and a few plugins needs considerably more, and the documentation says outright: "some hosts do not allow for increasing the PHP memory limit automatically. In that event, do contact your host" (WordPress Developer Resources). On a free plan both halves of that sentence are the problem: you cannot raise it, and there is nobody to contact.

Processor limits. Free accounts have hard caps on PHP execution time. Every heavier operation — a plugin update, thumbnail generation after an upload, a content import — gets cut off halfway, and what comes back is a gateway error instead of a page. Not a fault to report; it is how a free plan protects the server from one user.

Background tasks. WP‑Cron is not a system cron — WordPress fires it on page visits, and its documentation notes that "WP‑Cron does not run continuously, which can be an issue if there are critical tasks that must run on time" (WordPress Developer Resources). The recommended fix is to hook a real system scheduler — precisely what free plans do not expose. The result: scheduled posts publish late or not at all, and contact form messages can end up waiting for a passing visitor.

The conclusion is simple: free hosting suits a few static pages, not a WordPress site that is supposed to do anything.

When free hosting is the right choice

It is not always a trap, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Four situations where it is correct:

• You are testing a market. The site exists to find out whether anyone asks, and until that is known every euro above the minimum is spent on faith.
• The project has an end date. A landing page for a one-off campaign, an event site, something that lives two weeks.
• A non-commercial project. A hobby blog or a non-profit, provided the terms allow it — see point four above.
• A few pages with no moving parts. Static HTML, no forms, no blog, no logins.

The binding rule: keep on free hosting the things whose loss would not hurt. Anything with an address on a business card and in Google belongs where you pay, because paying is the only guarantee somebody has a reason to keep the service running. If you are weighing a zero budget more widely, three routes to a site for nothing are separate.

What moving to paid actually costs

The scale of the alternative surprises people, so know it before deciding free hosting is the only option for a small budget.

Shared hosting in the eurozone runs from about €32 to €130 a year for a simple business site — a few euros a month. One caveat, the same as with domains: the first-year price is often promotional and the renewal many times higher. IONOS charges €1 a month for twelve months on Webhosting Plus plus a €10 setup fee, then €11 — €22 in year one against €132 from year two. Strato does the same at €1 then €9. Compare two years, not the first invoice.

The counter-example matters, because it shows the teaser is a choice and not an industry law: Netcup charges €2.69 a month including VAT with no introductory rate at all — €32.28 a year, the same in year one and year five — and says so on the page: "The prices of our webhosting packages are valid for the entire term and not just for the first months."

The rest of the recurring lines are broken down separately, and you can price your own case in the maintenance cost calculator. The technical criteria for the server itself are here.

When to move to paid hosting

Five signals, any one of which is enough on its own:

• The site loads slowly and it is not the images, it is an overloaded server.
• You are running out of space for files or the database, and content is still arriving.
• The address appears in company material — business cards, invoices, proposals.
• You need somebody who answers when the site goes down on a Friday afternoon.
• Traffic is growing and the free plan's limits are a real ceiling, not a theoretical one.