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000webhost Review 2024 – Looks Good, but What’s the Catch?

Mark Holden Mark Holden Web Hosting Expert

000webhost is a pretty good budget host that can rapidly get expensive if you keep on adding add-ons. With that said, if all you’re looking for is a low-budget host with decent specs and easy setup, your search could be over. Read on to find out more about whether 000webhost is the right provider for you.

We hosted the same WordPress website on the most popular web hosting platforms and measured their performance
Click here to see our results >>

Overview

🏆Performance GradeA
⏱️Uptime GuaranteeNo
🔒Free SSLYes
🔧Hosting TypesShared
💡Basic Plan Features
  • Storage: 50 GB
  • Bandwidth: 100 GB
  • Websites: 1
💲Starting Price$1.99
Shared Reseller Dedicated Cloud WordPress
000webhost feat

While 000webhost isn’t bad for a free hosting service, we recommend you don’t waste your time with free hosting, even if you’re just starting out. You’ll have to deal with slow loading speeds, lots of downtime and no customer support, and migrating your site to a different host later can be a real pain. You can get high-quality hosting for an amazing price with Hostinger, who just happens to be 000webhost’s parent company.

Free Web Hosting Powered by Hostinger

Established over a decade ago, 000webhost is a free web host. It’s the daughter brand of Hostinger, and if you’re looking for free shared hosting, then it’s a pretty safe bet. It won’t serve ads alongside your content, and it comes with some of the perks of paid hosting, such as  PHP, MySQL, and cPanel. Click here to understand the key differences between Hostinger and 000webhost.

The company also sells (very cheap) paid plans from Hostinger, which come with a few extra incentives including more disk space and bandwidth, weekly backups and extensive support.

000webhost-overview1

If you’re running a professional outfit and your website is a primary source of income for you, 000webhost probably won’t cut it. That said, it’s good for hobbyists, and it can also be a good temporary solution if you need to create a development or testing environment.

There are a lot of other good reasons why you might want to consider 000webhost. It all comes down to your own specific needs.  Read on to find out whether 000webhost could work for you.

4.5

Features

You Get What You Pay For, and Then Some

As a whole, 000webhost offers fewer resources than many of its competitors – for instance, the bandwidth, disk space, domains, and subdomains are all capped.

If all you need is a simple hosting setup, it gets the job done. If you want to be able to customize your settings,  you’re going to need to look elsewhere.

000webhost has its own website builder. While it can be clunky from time to time, it’s not bad for a free service. It also provides hundreds of free templates, as well as free courses on everything from web development and SEO to digital marketing and game development.

It’s Free!

Everybody likes a freebie. And with 000webhost, you can get a “forever free” hosting plan. Unlike other free hosts, 000webhost won’t place ads on your site. However, even the company admits that this hosting comes with certain limitations.

That may not matter to you at this point. Maybe you’re learning how to build websites and you just want to play around. Or maybe you’re working on a large site and you need to test it online, but you don’t want to start paying for real hosting before it’s ready.

But be sure to do your research. Keep in mind that 000webhost was subject to a serious data breach in 2015. That said, the company did apologize and resolve all the issues, making it a far safer host today that it was before the attack.

Built-In Firewalls and DDoS Protection

000webhost’s hosting includes a firewall and DDoS protection built in, and the company has a dedicated administration team that keeps an eye on its servers around the clock. This means that even though your hosting is free, you can have the peace of mind that comes from having an extra pair of eyes on the server.

Advanced Capabilities

Some of the “advanced capabilities” that 000webhost offers would be classed as standard by other web hosts, but they’re still worth noting. These features include support for PHP, MySQL, Curl, GD2, Zend, VML, fopen(), PHP sockets, Ioncube Loader and .htaccess files.

000webhost-features1

Custom Control Panel

In addition to cPanel, 000webhost also has a custom control panel with a range of supplementary administration tools, including a bunch of one-click installers so you can get your new website started. You’ll also be able to park domains, manage domain names, and carry out other basic administrative tasks.

000webhost-features2

Instant Account Activation

All new accounts are activated instantly, and upgrades are processed instantly as well. That means you can get started straight away, even if you’re on the free plan.

000webhost-features3

4.6

Ease of use

Web Hosting for Dummies

One of 000webhost’s biggest pluses is how easy it is to get started. The onboarding process is pretty smooth and you can install a CMS or use the visual web builder without having to wait around for your account to be configured and installed.

The proprietary admin panel can be confusing at first, but you’ll wrap your head around it and other than that, it’s all pretty simple.

Creating an Account

As always, I thought it’d be worth testing the process by signing up and creating an account. It’s pretty easy to get going, but the platform will try to upsell features like daily backups and Cloudflare protection along the way. If you’re not careful, you can rack up a pretty hefty bill, but it can be worth at least considering some of the add-ons.

Click here to read about my experience signing up with 000Webhost.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

I also tried connecting a domain name and installing WordPress using one of the one-click installers. The whole process was surprisingly easy and self-explanatory. I even got on-screen instructions to map the domain, including the addresses of the nameservers.

Variety of Website Creation Tools

As a 000webhost customer, you get a choice of using either the one-click installers for popular content management systems or turning to the drag-and-drop website builder. If neither of those work for you, you can also connect via FTP and upload your own installers.

000webhost-ease-of-use1

Free Subdomains

Chances are that you’ll want to register a domain name of your own and point that to your 000webhost server. If not, you can take advantage of the free subdomains by hosting your site at [YOURNAME].000webhostapp.com.

This can come in handy as a way for you to access your site while you’re developing it, before finalizing the URL you plan to use.

Easy to Upgrade

000webhost makes it easy for you to upgrade your hosting package if you need more server space or resources. The transfer is quick, easy, and seamless, and upgrading unlocks additional perks like access to live support.

4.6

Performance

Mostly Okay, but Not the Best

000webhost talks a good game, claiming to provide “unparalleled reliability of free web hosting servers with 99.9% uptime.” Every web host seems to claim the same though, and some are better than others.

If you check 000webhost’s reviews, most customers seem pretty happy with the performance. It’s the customer service that they’re not fans of, but I’ll get to that later.

I conducted several tests to assess the performance. I found the loading speeds impressive across most of the United States and Europe, but the average was adversely affected by sluggish speeds in Sydney and Tokyo. Surprisingly, slow server loading also occurred in Atlanta.

All in all, considering this is a free provider, the results are excellent.

000webhost-performance1

4.5

Support

Limited Support for Free Users

If you go with 000webhost’s free plan, you’ll be left to fend for yourself, which is yet another reason why you’ll want to consider upgrading.

The good news is that there’s a discussion forum where you can get in touch with other customers, and paid customers have access to a 24/7 support team that works every day of the year.

I decided to contact the support team to test them out, and the experience wasn’t as smooth as it could have been.

The live chat is disabled for non-customers and in my experience, the team doesn’t respond to queries on social networking sites. Plus, while I tried to sign up to the discussion forums, I never received a confirmation email.

000webhost-support1

The agents were friendly and supportive enough when I contacted them as a paying customer, though. Each time I jumped on live chat as a paying client, the agent picked up instantly and resolved my problems quickly.

000webhost-support2

4.7

Pricing

000webhost’s basic plan is absolutely free, and the company promises it will stay free forever. You don’t even need to provide payment details, but if you are ready to upgrade to a paid plan, you can use a range of options from Visa and MasterCard to Bitcoin and PayPal.

With the fact that the core offering is free, you might not be surprised to learn that many of the add-ons are reasonably priced, too. The problems begin when you start adding so many add-ons and upgrades to your hosting package that it ends up costing more than it would if you went for a more premium web host that offered all of these features as standard.

Cancellation & Refunds

Canceling your 000webhost account is relatively simple, and you can read about the process here.

You’ll need to log into your dashboard and select Deactivate Account, and then provide a reason for your cancellation. If you’re on a paid plan, you should expect to receive a refund within seven days, although when I canceled my plan, I had to contact customer service to confirm it.

All in all, 000webhost’s cancellation and refund policies are at least on par with the rest of the industry. Although 000webhost did try to upsell me a VPS package, I can’t really blame them for wanting to retain their paying customers.

Comparison

How does 000webhost match up to the competition?

KamateraCompareOur Score4.8Compare
Liquid WebCompareOur Score4.8Compare
000webhostCompareOur Score4.4Compare
Tailor Made ServersCompareOur Score2.9Compare

000webhost REVIEW: BOTTOM LINE

000webhost is a pretty good budget host that can rapidly get expensive if you keep on adding add-ons. Because of that, it makes for a decent first-time hosting provider, but you may want to consider migrating if your site gets big enough.

On top of that, even the paid plans are barely enough for a professional outfit, so if your website is mission-critical, you may need to look elsewhere. With that said, if all you’re looking for is a low-budget host with decent specs and easy setup, your search could be over.

Just make sure that you know what you’re getting into and that you’re familiar with the drawbacks as well as the advantages before you go ahead and upgrade to a paid plan.

Still not sure if this is the right web host for you? Check out our top recommended web hosts to learn more.

FAQ

Do I need to pay extra for backups with 000webhost? 

Kind of. 000webhost is the daughter company of Hostinger. You get a limited amount of resources with 000webhost but can upgrade your plan to get more. Despite it appearing like you’re upgrading, all paid plans redirect you to Hostinger’s site.

Daily backups aren’t available with the free 000webhost bundle and are a paid addition with Hostinger’s entry-level package. They are included with Hostinger’s Business Shared Hosting plan.

In a way, you can’t get backups with 000webhost at all. You can upgrade to Hostinger to get a suite of features. Don’t forget to check out the latest deals for 2024 on our coupon page to save even more with your first website on Hostinger.

Why don’t you recommend free web hosting?

Free hosting can be a mixed bag. Sometimes, you can find useful but limited free plans like the one from 000webhost. Other times, you find a host which is unreliable or even dangerous to use. Small feature plans might work for some people but beware of providers with sketchy policies.

000webhost is not a sketchy provider, but there are limitations that come with using its free plan. 300MB of standard disk space and 3GB of bandwidth isn’t going to cut it if you want to build traffic past the hobbyist level. 

Is shared hosting from 000webhost good for eCommerce?

Truth be told, no. An eCommerce site should have a custom domain name, and absolutely must have an SSL certificate. While 000webhost’s free subdomains (your-domain.000webhostapp.com) do offer SSL, they will not instill confidence in your brand. And 000webhost’s free plan does NOT offer:
  • A free domain name
  • An SSL certificate for custom domains, and you can’t set up eCommerce-quality SSL manually, either
  • 24/7 support in case anything goes wrong

So, it isn’t possible to set up an eCommerce site at 000webhost. You may want to check out our 10 best web hosting services for 2024 to find a budget eCommerce-ready option, like 000webhost’s parent company, Hostinger.

Does 000webhost have cPanel?

No, but the 000webhost team has developed its own custom control panel to help you manage your hosting account. This includes free domain parking, a file manager, a web builder, a one-click installer for WordPress, and an option to unlock a second website.
Mark Holden Mark Holden
Mark is a full stack web developer specializing in HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP. When he’s not busy building websites or geeking out over the latest addition to his ever-growing gadget collection, he enjoys playing drums for his progressive rock band. He can also make a mean Spanish omelet.
2.3
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They will suspend your web site and extort you

I had a financial web site on 000webhost, and the suspended it because they said it had too many hits. That is impossible, because the site rarely got more than a couple of hits a day. Now they want me to upgrade to pay or send in all kinds of personal information to have the site turned back on. If they were honest, they would just turn the site off for the rest of the month and then turn it back on. Avoid this company.

avatar
Fred F, USA
September 26, 2022
1
Pushing for pay mode for websites with low usage

Got this free hosting for free about three to four years. After Hostinger acquired this company, company trying to push to premium model. I have to now move to premium mode (pay model) to unarchive my website as there is a low usage. More than 10GB I have to pay too :)

avatar
Baha, Australia
December 02, 2019
1
If you are new at this or on a tight budged I would say go with 000webhost

If you are new at this or on a tight budged I would say go with 000webhost. and improve first. Fun to get to know how things work, I liked to use it for some time and then I made up my mind to invest some money into blogging. But if you can easily make an investment now then, of course, get a paid plan.

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Amadej, USA
November 14, 2019
5
Family sharingMulti User SharingExpert SupportBackupSmart syncPersonal SolutionBusiness SolutionTeams optionsOffline foldersFile history and recovery
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