According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 35% of all the websites on the Internet. WordPress is the most popular CMS on the internet. There are lots if hosting services that provide hosting environment for WordPress. If you are startup, a small business or an individual who wants to have a website, WordPress would be an ideal option. But, you may have a tight budget and you just want to start it free and then move to a premium hosting when you start earning some dollars. Or you are just an individual who needs to have a personal website/blog. Then, you are reading the right article that gives you the solution.
The solution you are looking for is InfinityFree. While there are many hosting providers that offer free hosting, I recommend InfinityFree because of following reasons;
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Unlimited Disk Space
- 400 MySQL Databases
- Free DNS Service
- Easy Setup
- No Forced Ads
- Free SSL
- Able to Integrate Your Custom Domains.
As you see, many other hosting services that provides free hosting have many limitations like disk space, bandwidth, forced ads, no custom domains etc. but InfinityFree doesn’t have those limitations. Let’s see how you can setup your WordPress site with InfinityFree.
First go to InfinityFree website and register. You will need to verify your email. (Sometimes verification email won’t recieve, you may need to resend the verification email). After verification you will be redirected to Accounts page.
Before begin, you need to point your domain to InfinityFree nameservers. (Later you can remove them). This is to verify that you are the owner of the domain. Go to your DNS and add below records as nameservers;
- ns1.epizy.com
- ns2.epizy.com
The changes may take sometimes to appear. To check whether your changes are applied, go to DNS Lookup, enter your name and check whether InfinityFree nameservers appear. If InfinityFree nameserver appear, go back to your InfinityFree dashboard. Let’s create a new account. In the free plan, you can create up to 3 active accounts. Click create button.
Under domain type, select Custom Domain. Add your domain name and click Search Domain. In the next step give a unique password for the account and click Create Account after verifing that you are not a Robot. Now click View Client Area. Under account details, copy “Main Domain” address, go to your DNS manager and add a CNAME record pointing to the “Main Domain”. You can use the FTP Details to transfer your WordPress files from your local machine to your hosting using a FTP client like FileZilla. To visit the control panel, click Control Panel button. If you are visiting the control panel for the first time you will see a notice, in the notice page, click Approve. You will be redirected to Vista Panel where you can manage your hosting environment.
What are disadvantages of InfinityFree
All free hosting plans have their own disadvantages. Compared to other free hosting plans I’ve tried, InfinityFree is better. Although they provide unlimited bandwidth, there’s a daily hit limit of 50,000. That means your site can only get 50,000 visits per day. Well, that’s enough for a website with an average traffic. But the major problem is with daily CPU limit. If you hit the daily CPU limit, your website will be suspended for 24 hours. However they haven’t mentioned what is the daily CPU limit. But according to my personal experience, you may hit whatever the CPU limit if you are using too many plugins or plugins that need high processing power. Plugins like WooCommerce may exceed daily CPU limit.
So, this plan is not suitable for eCommerce sites. Well, non of the free hosting services are good for a serious online business. If you are going to start an serious online business, you need a premium and a reliable hosting plan. Otherwise you may lose many potential customers. Think if your website get stuck, get suspended, take too long to load or get unavailable, you will lose customers. To start a business, you need to invest some money and you should make sure that you invest this money to the right solution. Well, InfintyFree offer premium plan too. But I recommend to go with something more stable, if you are doing an online business.
An Online Business Needs A Reliable Hosting Service
You should select a hosting service that provides fast, reliable and secured service. I have tried many hosting providers, among them Cloudways was the best. Cloudways provides variety of hosting plans. They offer SSD storage with super fast loading. All plans support multi-sites and multiple applications. That means, you can host multiple websites in one server. You can have a WordPress website, a Prestashop site and a Laravel application in the same server. There’s no limit for the number of application you can host. But the performance depends on the server specification. They provide free SSL certification, free CDN, Automated Backups and many many more.
The customer support of Cloudways is also great. If you are planing to migrate your website to Cloudways, they provide gree migration support as well. You can spin up a trial server for 3 days without even using a credit card. This trial period is more than enough for you to test Cloudways environment. The other best feature is seamless vertical scaling. When your business is growing, you will need more server resources to cater the demand. You can scale the resources (RAM, CPU and Storage) without a downtime. Cloudways run on top of world renown Cloud Platforms like DigitalOcean, AWS and Google Cloud. Their hosting plan start from $10/month but they have a pay as you go model as well. So you will pay for what you use only.
The other best, popular and affordable service is HostGator. They have amazing and affordable WordPress hosting plans which helps you to start your online business.