Nowadays you can find tons of web sites that offer you free web hosting services which support many features and are suitable for running your website on it. I tried many of these website and found most of them have kind of issue. For instance, one was closed suddenly and the users could not access to their data or anything else, all was gone. Another example is their uptime or speed, it is possible that their servers are not that much reliable so you see their uptime is low and thus their services are not stable. Apart from all mentioned facts some apply some limitation such as limitation in making database, uploaded file size or even they add advertisements to your website. Although, most of free hosting websites are not reliable or they have some sorts of mentioned limitations, I have found two of them are far better than those that I have tried before. Hence, I will conduct simple comparison between two of free hosting websites.
Disclaimer: I do not take any responsibilities regarding the following websites such as loss of data and I just write about my own experience of these web hosting. In addition, this post is not advertising of any of the following websites.
Heliohost.org
This web hosting service is one the oldest free web hosting and provide better services in comparison other free web hosting. I only found two disadvantages on Heliohost hosting service. The first one is slow speed in loading Cpanel and website which sometimes gets annoying and the second is their low disk limitation (500MB only).
I shortlisted those features that I found important in this hosting site in below.
- Supports PHP, MySQL, ASP.NET, Postgre SQL, Ruby on Rails, Python, JSP, Perl.
- Supports unlimited number of FTP, Mail, Sub domains, database ,Email accounts.
- No monthly bandwidth limitation.
- No SSH access.
- Supports password protect directories.
- Supports CGI.
- You can configure your own domain for it.
- Provides only 500 MB disk space.
- No advertisements.
0hosting.org
s This web hosting is almost one of the reliable free hosting since it is six month that I run my website here and found it quite stable and reasonable, however, it has some disadvantages. The main issue is that, 0hosting does not support as many web technologies as Heliohost and also sometimes the website will not load and you need to try few times to load it (uptime issue and server responsibility). Finally, it does not support password protect directories feature which is really crucial for me but it might not be very important for other users.
Below list is the shortlisted of the services that 0hosting provides.
- Supports PHP, MySQL
- Supports unlimited number of FTP, Mail, Sub domains, database ,Email accounts.
- No monthly bandwidth limitation.
- Unlimited disk space.
- Built-in (web-based) SSH access.
- No password protect directories feature.
- No ASP.NET, Postgre SQL, Ruby on Rails, Python, JSP, Perl and CGI support.
- You can configure your own domain for it.
- No advertisements.
In conclusion, I think that Heliohost is considerably better than 0hosting in every aspect since it provides many services and is totally suitable for any developer who develops website with different web technologies but the only important disadvantage is very limited disk space. On the other hand, 0hosting provides service with higher speed and without any disk limitation but limited web technologies. At the end, for those who are looking to experience working with real host and Cpanel without limitation and highly customizable I recommend Heliohost if you can be fine with disk limitation. I also recommend 0hosting for those who want to upload many files or create many sub domains which each runs separate website and interested to run their website only on PHP and MySQL. Finally, if you are not satisfy with any of those service, it is highly recommended to buy host or use both of mentioned free hosting services probably Heliohost for running your website and 0hosting for uploading your files and storing them there to link to your Heliohost website.
For more information please refer to the official websites of Heliohost and 0hosting.