000webhost Reviews, Really better than paid hosting?
When talking about free web hosting service, 000webhost is probably the mostly recommended provider. No matter from US or any other country, it's a hot name among lots of users for rich feature and large number website support. Can we use 000webhost safely to start our first business? The answer is yes and no. We will explain in details from below and learn from existing user experience about the company.
Quick view of 000webhost service
Known as $0.00, 000webhost provides free web hosting with no ads on customer websites. It's advertised to be better than paid web hosting service, though they indeed provide paid hosting plan. 000webhost is division of hosting24 company who provides standard linux hosting solutions via shared, VPS and reseller plans.
000webhost Plan Features Review
000webhost provides two hosting plans – Free hosting & Premium hosting. While their paid plan is full functional like normal hosting service, there're various limitations for their free service. Main features of free plan includes
- 1.5GB account storage
- 100GB monthly data transfer
- Up to 5 add-on domains
- 2 free mysql databases
- 5 free email accounts
Besides all above, 000webhost service also provides a simple sitebuilder for quick website creation. For people who just want to host a simple website, it's absolutely perfect offer. Comparing to this free plan, their paid service provides everything unlimited.
For paid hosting plan, 000webhost provides standard cpanel control panel for website management. Although their advertisement says free cpanel hosting, they actually use a custom panel for free clients. This custom control panel software is much like directadmin but simplified a lot and only basic functions saved there. See below
Since 000webhost is most well known for its free service. They have used all available free resources to setup their system like free linux OS, free control panel and free client management software. The free boxbilling is used for client & billing management. Although it's provided as free software, boxbilling is pretty powerful and scalable. It's a full functional billing and client management system with all necessary support. See official site for detailed features www.boxbilling.com
Server Performance
With regarding to hosting server performance, since we personally have not used their service, we can not say it's pretty good or bad. We just did research on third party monitoring service and existing user experience. We can only say partially satisfied by most people. Although they have provided server uptime stats on official site, it's not updated so often and nobody can tell if it's true or not because no third party service is setup for this report.
Reliability
The 000webhost provides web hosting reviews for lots of hosting services. As expected, hosting 24 is ranked first among all other webhosts. If we compare their customer reviews we would find they're all about positive comments to hosting24 but it's hard to find a good review to any other service provider. How could it be? they're only hosting happy clients? Absolutely not. They're simply doing something extreme – Best for themselves and bad for anyone else.
000webhost has been successful for brand promotion, however they're now simply a landing page of hosting24 website. They try to guide people to paid plans intentionally or unintentionally by various comparison.
Customer support
So, regarding to the most part of hosting service – support, how it's working on 000 company? It's not good based lots of user experience. According to this typical discussion on drupal forum, their support is mainly handled by volunteers. This is not only for free clients but also for paid service. As we learnt, they don't keep a backup for clients and has the right to delete clients' website or even hosting account without notification. If high quality customer support is required for your website, it's obvious you need other hosting services.
Do we recommend?
The answer is no. No matter if you just need simple website support or business hosting services. Their free or paid plans are not recommended regardless its popularity. Web hosting is a handy service today and there're lots of cheap providers with super nice support. At least we have the chance to complain and get concerned when problem occurs because we paid for it. However, we really can't and shouldn't expect too mcuh for such free service. The company has full rights over customer accounts thus if you host some valuable online profiles, they're in risk of being removed. Also, free hosting servers are setup with almost no serious protection such as anti-virous and attack etc.
Good and cheap hosting recommendation? Simply refer to our home page and top hosts are explained with best offer.