Hostmaster is an Israeli hosting company that offers free domain registration and a free web hosting platform. Their portfolio of sites suggests that they target mostly individuals and small businesses, which is hardly surprising for a free provider. They have been voted one of the best free site-building and storage providers for ten consecutive years.
Features and Ease of Use
Hostmaster’s fee-free services are not at all feature-free. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll get when you sign up with them:
- Free domain
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- FTP accounts
- MySQL databases
- WordPress-ready
- Free hosting
- Site builder
- Ad-free hosting
Hostmaster has been around for a long time, so they clearly know what their customers want. I’m baffled about how they actually make money, especially since they seem to have excellent hardware. For next-to-nothing, you get good performance and a good 99.9% uptime guarantee, so you can trust them with your HTML/PHP or WordPress website.
I also love the fact that customers get the user-friendly cPanel control panel that makes it easy to manage every aspect of your hosting. You can add domains, create emails, and set up your MySQL databases from one central place. You’ll soon see that it’s so easy to navigate and configure security settings too.
The icing on the cake has to be their free website builder tool. I haven’t explored it in any great detail, but I can conclude that it has a drag-and-drop interface and comes with many modern templates that can be customized for particular websites. If you want to build a CMS site, you can make use of their WordPress Premium Template that is included as a gift.
Pricing and Support
While working my way through Hostmaster’s website, I couldn’t see any sign of prices at all. This might sound obvious for a free hosting provider, but we all know that if something looks too good to be true… it probably is. But unlike other free providers, this one doesn’t inject adverts into your websites or charge any hidden fees, so I have absolutely no idea how they actually generate revenue. However, I do know that I love the idea of a truly free web host with a truly free website builder.
Although I didn’t come across any self-help tutorials on their website, you can easily get in touch with their responsive and friendly technical support team via email.
How much does Hostmaster cost?
Hostmaster offers multiple plans priced highest to lowest. The price depends on which type of hosting plan you choose. You can see the updated pricing table (updated weekly) below.
Which Hostmaster plan should I get?
My recommendation is to start with a cheaper plan. You can always upgrade later on. Hostmaster can help you with the migration to a more expensive plan. The increase in visitors many times takes longer than expected and you shouldn’t pay a lot of money until the need arises. Of course, your needs may vary, and you can consult with a hosting expert from Hostmaster.
How good is Hostmaster’s customer support?
Hostmaster is not ranked as one of our top web hosts. But that can also be a result of Hostmaster being a small, under the radar, hosting provider. There are advantages to a small hosting company – as a customer, you are more important to them. You can also check out our comparison of the most popular web hosting services here.
