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

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 a very low 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.