Free hosting with PHP and MySQL – myth or reality?
Creating the first site, people usually try not to invest a lot of money in it. Therefore, the priority of solutions that do not require financial investments: free tariff on the site builder, free hosting, preferably with support for PHP and MySQL, but without advertising. Finding the right options is really possible: but is it worth using such “gifts”?
Search for a free site site
So, you decided to create a website on one of the content management systems (CMS) – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. One of the main questions – on which hosting engine to place, so that “everything worked, did not ask for money and did not climb with its advertising”?
5 years ago, the search for free hosting was a real torment. Services offering such services either terribly slowed down and did not allow the site to function normally, or suddenly ceased to exist. With the development of competition between hosters “free” offers appeared more. Free hosting with PhP and MySQL without ads is a reality, but this reality has a number of pitfalls that you should not forget.
Free Hosting Restrictions
Hosters set various restrictions on free site hosting. There are several main limitation criteria:
Disk space from 50 MB to 20 GB.
Traffic – from 1 GB to 200 GB.
The number of databases is usually one or two.
The number of sites created for one account is one or two.
If you wish, you can find a decent platform where you will be given 100 GB of disk space, two MySQL databases, support for PhP and other necessary things. Placed on such a free hosting site will work properly, but as soon as the load on it increases (the number of visitors increases), access problems will begin.
Possible problems
Hosting is a service that requires payment. Free hosting should be considered only as a demo version of the normal site for hosting the site. It seems that all the functions are available, but at the most interesting place the game is interrupted. The restriction on disk space does not allow adding new materials, the traffic restriction forces visitors to wait for pages to load. It is not profitable for a hoster to work with those who do not pay for services, so all problems arising on a free site are solved last.
If necessary, you can optimize the site so that you will miss even the minimum set: for example, do not use flash-animation to reduce traffic consumption. But it cannot go on like this for a long time – the more popular your web resource is, the more the limitations set on free hosting will affect its work.
Should I use free hosting?
Free hosting can be found and even for some time to use it – see how everything works, quietly set up the site, get the first visitors. But if you want to create a large portal with a bunch of content and decent attendance, then free hosting will soon begin to fail. You will have to switch to paid tariffs, and it is better to do this in the framework of one hosting service than transfer the site to another site. The transfer may be accompanied by the occurrence of various errors, which is fraught with the loss of space in the search results.
Tip: choosing a free hosting, pay attention to the paid rates. If you are satisfied with the pricing policy of the host, you do not need to immediately take the most expensive tariff. Use the services for free, and when you realize that it is time to move to another level, simply change the tariff.
Conclusion
The choice of hosting can be compared with the choice of a place to build a house. If necessary, the building (site) can be moved to a more convenient place, but it will require effort, time and money. Therefore, it is better to choose the site at which the site will work for a long time and productively.
