Questioning whether free website hosting is any good is perfectly normal as you look for the right hosting service for your online needs

When looking to set up and maintain a website on a budget, you will likely be drawn towards the best web hosting provider that\'s free to help cut costs

But be careful, as we found that out of a list of 18 free website providers that we compiled, only eight of them (less than half) actually delivered the full hosting package you\'ll need for your site, and only six made our list of the best free website hosting services

**Hostinger is the surprise 19th candidate with an exclusive offer for TechRadar readers
Because you are being provided with a free service, the obligations usually attached to a paid subscription no longer exist, but you are usually left to your own devices when things go wrong

None of the free website hosting providers that passed our test could measure up to even the cheapest paid-for service on the market when measuring the quality of the product or its features

**Which is why Hostinger\'s offer is so alluring as it is a proper shared hosting service __ (opens in new tab) Hostinger "free website" hosting offer 41.88** 0**
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 Get everything you need to put your business online with a WordPress friendly hosting package that comes with 30GB of storage and 100GB bandwidth. Grab a full refund of $41.88/£41.88 in Amazon vouchers when you purchase Hostinger’s single shared hosting package **TechRadar Pro exclusive** opens in new tab **Terms and conditions apply** Initial purchase required**
We also discovered that the websites of some free website hosting providers were not properly secured, which doesn’t generate much faith in their ability to deliver the level of service you’d expect from paid-for providers. (This also applies to some free website builder services). Remember the old adage: ‘You get what you pay for’? Well, nowhere else in the tech business is this truer than with web hosting

Our advice would be to steer clear of free website hosting services altogether as it isn\'t a good option for the majority
**except for Hostinger\'s one Choosing the best cheap web hosting services may be a better option if you are on a budget. However, should you still want to proceed with a free website hosting service, scroll down to see the list we\'ve made of the best on the market

## The best free website hosting providers of 2022
TechRadar Pro has partnered with popular website hosting website Hostinger to offer a

**full refund** (by way of an Amazon voucher) on its __ (opens in new tab). Just pay for your hosting, send us the email you used to buy the hosting package and the invoice number and we will send you an single shared hosting package__ **Amazon voucher**to cover your cost in USD or GBP only (worth £41.88/$41.88). Other __terms and conditions__apply

Hostinger is one of the biggest brands when it comes to web hosting with millions of websites hosted on its server. Our latest exclusive offer represents a huge jump compared to what you usually get in the world of free web hosting providers

You get a whopping 30GB of fast SSD storage with 100GB monthly bandwidth, robust
__DNS__ management, __Cloudflare__ protected nameservers plus full support (24x7x365) and uptime guarantee (99.9 unheard of at this price point

Those who want to cut their teeth on Automattic’s ubiquitous WordPress
__CMS__ will be glad to learn that this is a fully-fledged, LiteSpeed accelerated __WordPress hosting__ service complete with beginner-friendly features like auto-updates, site-building wizards and a useful database of ready-to-use __tutorials__ (opens in new tab). **Read our full** **Hostinger review**
In the world of free website hosting, Infinityfree (opens in new tab) stands out for good reasons, which is why it\'s top of our best free website hosting list. It has a well-designed website that makes a positive impression and ticks the right boxes for us. Its homepage gets a C performance grade in our load time test but other than that, it looks pretty solid

Infinityfree has been in the business for over six years, claims to have over 400,000 users, and offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth (albeit with a very generous 50,000 daily hits). You can host as many domains as you want but you will only get 10 email accounts and one FTP to upload your content

There are no hidden fees and despite its free status, you will get a 99.9% uptime guarantee (although that said, you are more or less on your own if your site goes down) and the popular Softaculous Script installer with more than 400 applications

We were surprised to see that this provider\'s features list includes 400 MySQL databases (where others give only a handful, if any at all), a free DNS service, free SSL and free Cloudflare CDN. That\'s impressive for a free offering

As expected Infinityfree also sells cheap paid-for hosting (Infinityfree Ultimate Premium (opens in new tab)) that offers unlimited everything for $6.90 per month, which is worth an upgrade as you will also get access to CloudFlare Railgun, which cuts load times significantly

**Read our full ** **Infinityfree web hosting review**

Byethost (opens in new tab) is part of Byet Internet, a US-based provider of hosting, domain name and reseller services. With more than one million websites hosted, Byethost claims that its free hosting service is "one of the most powerful networks dedicated solely to free hosting in the world."
Users are given 1GB of server space, 50GB monthly bandwidth and MySQL / PHP compatibility. They also benefit from 24/7 tech support, which is obviously a boon, as well as access to Byethost\'s community and knowledgebase

The Softaculous platform gives you automatic installation of WordPress and hundreds of other popular web applications, and there\'s a free website builder (with platforms) if you need it. It\'s ad-free, too

Furthermore, if you are ever interested in becoming a free website hosting provider yourself, Byethost operates a separate entity, myownfreehost (opens in new tab), that allows you to do just that

**Read our full ** **Byethost Free web hosting review**
000Webhost (opens in new tab) is a free website hosting provider owned and operated by Hostinger. 000Webhost has been around for 10 years and has millions of users, which unfortunately makes it a prime target for hackers. In 2015, the provider’s entire database was compromised with details of an estimated 13.5 million accounts stolen. Since then, 000Webhost has completely changed but many users still remember the hack to this day

With 000Webhost, you\'ll get cPanel, a website builder and a WordPress auto-installer, plus a further benefit is that there are no ads. However, the bandwidth and especially the disk space are on the low side, with 3GB bandwidth and only 300MB of disk space

As expected, there’s no SSL certificate, but what is slightly surprising is the absence of subdomains and email accounts, as well as a lack of support via tickets (you have to go through the forums when you need help)

You should be able to install two websites with 000Webhost, but we got an error message when we tried to do this a second time, saying that we had reached our limit. Furthermore, the account creation email was flagged by Google as a suspicious email, with a pop-up warning that malware often comes from that URL. Note that you can also create a website on 000webhostapp.com using the same credentials as 000webhost.com

**Read our full ** **000webhost review**
You could easily confuse Googiehost (opens in new tab) with Googlehost, a cheeky way of getting some attention. However, the eight-year-old Googiehost still remains one of the better options in a not-so-greatof free website hosting providers


That said, the company’s website inspires little confidence. The small print copyright notice was extended to 2021 even when it was the year 2018, presumably to protect against potential infractions by time travelers. Also, odd grammatical mistakes abound –
* Lastest, Trsuted, Powerfull* – that sort of thing (and at the time of writing, there are apparently \'2,12,820\' users all over the world)

Still, it’s not all bad. This is the only provider here to come with cPanel and Cloudflare, albeit in its free form. However, note that we experienced a few instances where the dreaded “your connection is not private”up on our screen when trying to access cPanel. That’s never a good sign as Chrome is identifying it as a “not secure” property

Googiehost’s revenue model relies on some of its free websites converting to paid-for affairs via Interserver.net. Plus it does run a few banner ads on the control panels and on its own website – but not on the users’ sites

A last caveat: You need to provide a reason for the firm to accept your website, a special version of Recaptcha, and a surprising way to weed out spammers

Like Byethost, FreeHostingNoAds (opens in new tab) delivers just what it says on the tin: Free website hosting without any adverts. The brand is owned by Runhosting (opens in new tab), an established web hosting provider that offers unlimited disk space and unlimited traffic for as little as $2.49 per month

As expected, though, FreeHostingNoAds offers a small subset of what you get with a paid-for account and uses the same dashboard as Batcave (opens in new tab) (1GB/5GB/1 domain) and FreeHostingEU (opens in new tab) (200MB/4GB/5 domains). The latter are two other free website hosting providers that share an identical set of features with FreeHostingNoAds, and may well be part of the same family

An SSL certificate, which will give you the all-important security padlock in browsers, will set you back an eye-watering $30. The control panel, via Zacky Tools Installer, is extremely limited, with either Grav, WordPress or Joomla being offered as one-click installs. However, you will be able to install your own should you want to do so – but bear in mind that the file size limit is only 15MB

Creating a new account is straightforward, but we were slightly concerned by the fact that the account emails landed straight in our spam box, a sign that some sites hosted by FreeHostingNoAds might be on a deny list

**Read our full ** **Free Hosting No Ads review**
FreeWebHostingArea (opens in new tab) might sport the design of a website from 1999, but it’s another option if you want a free website hosting company that can give you unlimited bandwidth (or at least that’s the provider’s claim)

What’s more, it offers a more generous storage capacity than most, giving you 1.5GB of web space, plus you get three MySQL databases – which again outperforms most rival free website hosting providers

The control panel is rudimentary, and at the time of writing, the site builder and the auto-installer were not working properly, leaving any user with the task of uploading their files via FTP if they want to create their own websites. The maximum file size allowed on FreeWebHostingArea is 12MB

FreeWHA, as it is also known, also gives users daily or weekly offsite backups and no ads on low traffic websites. Upgrade to the FreeWHA Basic package (opens in new tab) for $12 a year and you get the ads removed regardless of how popular the site is, along with five MySQL databases per account, one-click database backup and priority technical support

**Read our full ** **Free Web Hosting Area review**
## Discard corner
We eliminated the following ‘free’ web hosting companies during our extensive evaluation of the current market

- Freevirtualservers, Freehosting and Freehostia: All of these were removed because they either require you to buy a domain name from them, or transfer your own

- X10hosting: The login section no longer works

- Uhostfull: We were not able to create a new account because it kept complaining about non-valid characters for a non-existent domain field

- Instafree: It has a very convoluted signup process requiring you to give your date of birth and gender before waiting up to 48 hours for approval

- 5GBfree and Hoophost: They no longer accept new accounts. Hoophost candidly admitted that this was because of spam accounts

- AdvancedFreeWebHost: This provider wants you to subscribe to a YouTube channel and remain subscribed to it. Failure to do so will see your account deleted

## Best free website hosting service FAQs
 Why do web hosting companies offer free hosting?
Free website hosting should be seen as a marketing tool which means that terms and conditions may be changed frequently, and since there is no financial transaction, downtimes may be more frequent as SLA (service level agreements) are non-existent.\n
Free website hosting comes with a number of limitations of course. Server space, site speed, traffic, uptime guarantees, and backup provision are all features that are often curtailed, but that\'s not to say that good cheap hosting isn\'t available.\n
Bear in mind that free website hosting exists because it allows companies to upsell more expensive web hosting to those who may need it

 Pros and cons of free website hosting

There are way more cons than pros for free website hosting. The main (and only) pro is that it’s free, you really don’t pay a dime for it. This might be an okay choice for just trying out yourself in creating a website but you are almost always better off just paying for a good hosting provider, and there are some cheap ones too.\n
As you can imagine, there are quite a few cons to free website hosting. Performance is vastly inferior to paid hosting, security is questionable, don’t expect too much from customer support (if there’s any), and more often than not, you’re on your own if there’s some trouble with the website. All in all, if you can, stay away from free website hosting and pick a good cheap hosting provider

 Is free website hosting safe?
Free website hosting is as safe as any other hosting provider, with the caveat that less focus is provided on stability and support. This means you cannot presume that any backups will be made or will be reliable, so you must take extra steps to save and download your own data as required. That doesn\'t mean to say that free website hosting companies are bad or unreliable, just that with paid services you are paying for that stability, support, and reliability.\n
However, the bottom line is that while free website hosting can be great for small hobby websites, any serious website - even if it\'s just a contact page - needs to have it\'s own paid web hosting service. Not only does this imply extra protections for your website, but it also looks more professional if you don\'t have unnecessary website credits or even ads on your website

 How we choose and test these free website hosting services
Our reviewers test each service by signing up and purchasing a plan to check out what each web hosting provider offers new users, as well as how easy it is to navigate around each brand’s dashboard. We pay a great deal of attention to the support that is offered to you.\n
We weigh up the details of what you get, (as well as what you don\'t) and rank each web hosting provider based on the quality of its features that many customers will use, and how clear the web hosting company is on what the customer is getting in every product

## Is free website hosting good?
Yes and no, mostly no. While it is free, there are serious drawbacks to it. You are very limited with what you can do, a good deal of websites aren’t even secured properly, and if anything goes wrong you’re pretty much left to your own devices

As we mentioned earlier, you’re better off choosing some cheap web hosting provider than going free. Still, it’s ultimately your choice, and free website hosting can be adequate for some specific situations, like newbies who want to dabble a bit with creating a website

## Terms and conditions for free web hosting offer
1. Purchase the

__ ($3.49/£3.49 per month for 12 months) from Hostinger and apply to receive a free Amazon voucher worth £41.88/$41.88. You may purchase a longer subscription but you will receive the same Amazon voucher value as stated above. single shared hosting package__ __You MUST use this affiliated link__and remain a subscriber for 60 days before you apply for the free Amazon voucher

2. Submit the proof of purchase to TechRadar by emailing
[email protected] Your proof of purchase will include the invoice or order number and the email address that you used to purchase the package. We will verify your purchase with Hostinger. We reserve the right to withhold the voucher if we are unable to verify your purchase. Our decision is final as to whether or not your purchase is eligible

3. Please note that it may take up to 15 working days for your purchase to be verified and the voucher to be issued. For eligible purchases, the voucher will be an e-voucher sent to the email address you provided us with your submission

4. The voucher will be issued either in US dollars or Pound Sterling depending on your location. Your voucher can only be redeemed at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. It is non transferable and cannot be exchanged for cash or other consideration. Your details will only be used to verify the validity of your purchase and not for any other purpose

5. TechRadar is owned by Future Publishing Ltd (“Future”) of Quay House, the Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA. Future will deliver the voucher for eligible purchases in accordance with these terms.\n