Free WordPress Hosting and is it Worth it?

You can have your WordPress blog up and running for free! Yes, paying $0.00/month for web hosting.

A common scenario that usually happens to new website owners is to jump on a hosting plan with decent characteristics that will never be used and are just a waste of money. The truth is most of the time your site(s) will consume less than 5% of your hosting plan’s resources.

In this case, you might want to start with Free hosting to test the waters first, later if your website gets popular and start to require more resources, then you can move to the next step of the ladder.

When one should consider trying a free hosting plan:

  • Absolute beginners who want to get familiar with WordPress and build their first blog ever.
  • Users ready to move to self-hosted websites and ditch the wordpress.com
  • Anyone that owns a domain, but don’t want to pay for hosting plan.

Other than that if you are planning to grow and even earn some money with your blog, choosing a cheap paid plan is the safe way to go!

[alert-note]In WPCtrl we like to test the stuff we write about from first hand. That’s why we registered an account with the AwardSpace Free plan and created a live website as a proof for our readers. Visit robuststyle.com – A website hosted for $0,00/month [/alert-note]

Where is the Downside of the Free Hosting?

The free hosting servers are slow…DEAD SLOW!

This is a fresh WordPress install, with the default WP theme and plugins, on an AwardSpace free hosting plan. Even more ridiculous was the time it took me to log-in to the admin area.

To compare this result, we’ll run the very same test on a $1,99 cheap shared hosting plan…

This is a local hosting company operating only in my country, so it won’t be relevant to share the provider name.

You can see the difference between the two. And this gap will widen as times go by and content is being posted, and plugins are being added.

Is it Worth to Even Start with a Free Hosting?

The short answer is no! If you plan to spend time on making a website, it will be foolish to build it on “sand”.

If you just want to upload a gallery of your cat and write short poems about mr. Purrfect, you can stay with the Free hosting plan as long as you wish, but for something more, you will be disappointed and frustrated with the service.

I highly suggest you to buy your own domain name even with a free plan. You could live with the free hosting, but Free domain just sucks!

You can get one for as low as $8 (or even cheaper) from any popular domain provider.

The Best Alternative – Cheap Shared Hosting

It depends on your website’s traffic and goals, but most of the time for starters, shared hosting is the way to go!

If you want to have your own website, on your own domain, but you don’t want to pay for an annual hosting plan you can test the 3-month plans that most of the companies offer.

We highly suggest the WordPress plans offered by SIteground.

WPCtrl.com