Hostinger vs. 1FreeHosting – Which One Is Actually Better? [2020]

If you’re looking for free PHP hosting to get started with your test website or a hobby project, your online search could take you to 1FreeHosting. If the price is a decisive factor, you can even consider Hostinger’s “almost free” starting shared hosting plan.

So, how do you decide which one of these is positioned better to meet your hosting needs? To answer this question, I tested both of them using multiple parameters like features, pricing, performance, and support. I found Hostinger to be the winner, thanks to offering more advanced features, better performance, enhanced security, and lightning-fast support.

For Hostinger’s latest deals, click here or continue reading to know more about what makes Hostinger win this contest.

1. Plans and Pricing

Free isn’t always better and 1FreeHosting proves this

Hostinger’s hosting services on offer include shared, email, WordPress, and cloud hosting along with VPS hosting. Its 3-tiered shared hosting plan starts at a dirt-cheap rate, which can be called almost free. The available billing cycles are 1, 12, 24, and 48 months. However, this web host offers the cheapest prices with the longest (quadrennial) term.

In contrast, 1FreeHosting just offers a single shared hosting plan. It’s completely free with no hidden fees or extra costs. Though being “free” makes it appealing compared to Hostinger’s paid plans, you shouldn’t make a decision based on just the price tag. You need to consider the value for money the plans will offer and in this case, Hostinger is far better than 1FreeHosting.

Hostinger gives you a 30-day money-back guarantee. Since 1FreeHosting offers a free plan, there’s no such guarantee from it.

Despite Hostinger pricing being steeper than 1FreeHosting, it offers more plan variety and better value for money to ace this round.

2. Features

Hostinger races ahead with its better resource allocations and advanced features

With Hostinger’s 3 shared plans, you’ll get to host 1-unlimited websites. Resource allocations on offer include 10GB SSD-100GB SSD disk space and 100GB-unlimited bandwidth. With the 2 higher plans’ annual or above terms, you’ll get a free domain. The operating system in use with these plans is CloudLinux while the control panel you’ll get to use is a custom-developed one (that Hostinger calls the hPanel). Since these plans are WordPress-optimized and use SSDs as well as custom-built caching plugins, they will make your WordPress websites run up to 50% faster.

Other features on offer include ascending RAM and processing power (1X-4X), a 1-click auto-installer that will help in the installation of over a 100 applications, an SEO-friendly, drag-and-drop Zyro website builder (free for a month), backups (weekly/daily), free/paid CDN, and DNS management.

1FreeHosting’s free plan offers Linux OS, 10GB disk space, 100GB bandwidth, 5 free subdomains, and weekly backups (for sites not larger than 2GB). Your account management is made easy via 1FreeHosting cPanel control panel. You’ll also get other freebies like Fantastico auto-installer (to install popular apps with a single click including osCommerce, CubeCart, and Zen Cart), a website builder, professional web design templates, Search Engine submitter and SEO tools, among others.

Check the table below for a quick side-by-side comparison of the two web hosts.

With its better resource allocations and features that are more advanced and better than 1FreeHosting, Hostinger gives you better value for money. Thus, it wins this round.

3. Performance

Hostinger’s A+ performance easily outshines 1FreeHosting’s poor performance

With Hostinger, your customers will enjoy lower latencies and faster loading times, thanks to its Tier-3 datacenters located across seven different regions. This web host also uses cloud hosting technology for much faster WordPress speed (3X optimized) along with SSDs, Cloudflare CDN, and LSCache for WordPress.

1FreeHosting doesn’t say anything about its datacenters. It uses dual quad-core processor servers with specially compiled Linux OS kernels and multiple 10GbE connections.

Thanks to its much better performance, Hostinger scores an easy win in this round.

4. Security

Hostinger takes your website security seriously but 1FreeHosting doesn’t

Hostinger’s rock-solid security includes SSL, HTTP/2, automatic backups, instant server monitoring, LVE containers, BitNinja/Imunify360, and DDoS protection with Wanguard.

With 1FreeHosting, you’ll get DDoS attack and hacking protection. However, it doesn’t offer basic security measures like SSL or anti-virus. It says it doesn’t need to provide anti-virus on a Linux box as its security team is entrusted with the task of handling the server threats. To protect its servers, this web host uses large mod_security rulesets and an extensive custom firewall rule. But beyond this, it says its other security methods and precautions are classified.

With not much-advanced security on offer, 1FreeHosting makes me worried about security and I would rather host my website somewhere else like Hostinger where I’m assured of getting much better and advanced security measures.

With its far better security measures than 1FreeHosting, Hostinger wins this round hands down.

5. Support

Hostinger’s superfast support is miles ahead of 1FreeHosting’s unresponsive support  

For its logged-in users, Hostinger offers 24/7 live chat and ticket support. You can even seek 24/7 support via its online inquiry form. Those who hate waiting in the queue and don’t mind paying for quicker support can use its Priority Support. When I reached out to Hostinger’s support staff via live chat, I got lightning-fast replies to my questions, which was really impressive! For self-help, you’ll get a blog and a knowledgebase along with multiple tutorials.

For non-registered customers, the only way to seek support from 1FreeHosting is through an online form. Registered customers can sign in and use their cPanel ticket system to get support. When I used its online form to seek answers to a few pre-sales questions, I failed to elicit a reply. Except for an FAQ section, there’re no other self-help tools.

Due to its unresponsive support and extremely limited self-help options, 1FreeHosting loses out to Hostinger.

1FreeHosting Is No Match for Hostinger

In every category that these two web hosts were tested for, 1FreeHosting lags behind its more illustrious competitor. Be it features, pricing, performance, support, or security, Hostinger is miles ahead and offers you much better value for money. So, I don’t even need to contemplate before giving my vote of confidence to Hostinger. And Hostinger isn’t just my personal recommendation. It’s also our in-house team’s top choice. When I and my colleagues tested dozens of web hosts, it was at #1 on our list of the best web hosting services​.

Comparison Table

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