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Best Free Web Hosting

Create an online presence without spending a dime

  • Best for personal websites
    InfinityFree
    • Free
    • Unlimited bandwidth
    • PHP and MySQL
    • No ads
  • Best for cloud services
    Amazon Web Services Free Tier
    • Free
    • 100 AWS services
    • 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time
    • Simple automation
  • Best for blogging
    Medium
    • Free
    • Wide reach
    • Monetization options
    • Easy customization

Our pick: InfinityFree

InfinityFree is the best all-around free web hosting you can find. It’s reliable. It’s flexible. It’s been around for over a decade. And importantly, it doesn’t try to monetize its users. You couldn’t give them money, even if you wanted to.

While there are free web hosting services that offer more features that might be beneficial to some users, InfinityFree is just basic web hosting. That makes it great for people (or businesses) who want more than a simple blog or want more control of their platform. If that’s what you’re looking for, it’s a safe bet.

The three best free web hosting options

Compare free web hosting providers

Best forModel/servicePrice*FeaturesGet it
Best for personal websitesInfinityFreeFreeUnlimited bandwidth
PHP and MySQL
Visit Site
Best for cloud servicesAmazon Web Services Free TierFree100 AWS services
400,000 GB-seconds of compute time
Visit Site
Best for bloggingMediumFreeMonetization options
Easy customization
Visit Site

What to look for in a free web hosting service

If you’re looking for free web hosting, the “free” part is probably very important. Be wary of providers that only offer limited free trials, lock important features behind a paywall, or aggressively try to upsell you. There are truly free options if that’s what you really want.

When deciding among the free options, your choice of a web host depends mostly on the features you need for your site. For most general-purpose sites, we recommend a basic and flexible hosting solution like InfinityFree. If you have highly technical needs, like allowing users to create an account on a custom mobile app, these are best achieved through cloud services from a provider like AWS, which has an impressive free tier. If ease of use is the most important feature you need, you can get a nice-looking blog set up easily with a site like Medium.

Learn more about web hosting features below.

Best for personal websites: InfinityFree

Best for personal websites

Specs:

  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • PHP 8.3
  • MySQL 8.0 / MariaDB 11.4
  • 5 GB disk space

The great thing about InfinityFree is that you can do just about anything because it gives you a blank canvas. And since you have access to PHP and MySQL, you can do almost anything you can do with a basic paid web host. Want a WordPress blog? Install WordPress. Want a secure CMS? Install Drupal. Want an e-commerce site? Install WooCommerce or Magento.

The downside is that you have to build your whole site from scratch. Fortunately, while this will take a bit more work than a site that works right out of the box, you don’t need to be a full-stack developer or even a particularly tech-savvy person to get something up and running. Tons of online guides and tutorials can walk you through the steps of setting up software like WordPress on your new site, or even help you write a basic HTML page. If you don’t mind putting in a bit of elbow grease, you can make InfinityFree do just about whatever you want.

Another nice feature of InfinityFree that you won’t find anywhere else is the complete lack of ads or upselling. InfinityFree makes enough money from ad revenue on its own site to cover its operating costs. Ironically, this means that its own site is kind of a mess so that your site doesn’t have to be. There are also no premium tiers or paywalled features to entice you with. It’s just free web hosting. And that’s pretty awesome.

Pros:

  • Flexibility on par with paid hosting
  • No upselling

Cons:

  • No built-in CMS

Best for cloud services: Amazon Web Services Free Tier

Best for Cloud Services

Specs:

  • 100 AWS services
  • 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time
  • Simple automation

Cloud computing provides computing resources like hardware, software, and storage to people and businesses on demand. Large organizations can easily spend millions of dollars annually on cloud services, but you can get started for free with an account on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS offers several free short-term trials for its cloud services, but it also has an always-free tier that allows users to explore limited versions of over 100 different AWS services. While the free tier doesn’t come with enough power for enterprise users, it’s more than enough for you to build a web app for your small business or create some simple automation to assist you in your daily workflow.

Cloud computing requires a high level of technical skill, and most people looking to create a website won’t have a use for these services anyway. But if you’re a savvy web developer or someone who wants to learn these skills, the AWS free tier is an amazing opportunity to get started.

Pros:

  • Access to cloud computing
  • Always free

Cons:

  • High technical requirements
  • Limits on services

Best for blogging: Medium

Best for Blogging

Specs:

  • Monetization options
  • Easy customization

Medium is a blogging site that gives you a ready-made platform with a lot of customization options. It has a more professional feel than sites like Blogger or Tumblr, and plenty of professional writers and journalists make use of it. Medium is also a popular site, so it’s a good way to build an audience if you don’t already have one. Medium offers monetization options, but it doesn’t encourage you to put all of your content behind a paywall in the same way Substack does.

Of course, while Medium is a very customizable blogging platform, it is still a blog, so you don’t have as much freedom as a hosting service that just gives you a blank slate. But if you just want a user-friendly way to start posting content online, Medium can get you there in five minutes instead of five hours, and you won’t have to do any debugging along the way.

Pros:

  • Wide reach
  • Low barrier to entry

Cons:

  • No control of the platform
  • Difficulty in standing out

Web hosting specs and features

There are many different types of websites, and each type has vastly different technical requirements. Depending on whether you’re building a personal portfolio, a webpage for your small business, or an online space for your community, you’ll be looking for different features from your web host.

In many cases, the quality and reliability of these features will be more important than cost. If you need more than you can get from a free web host, you might want to look into paid web hosting. That said, starting with a free option is still often a good way to get started and find out which features are worth paying for.

PHP and MySQL

PHP is a server-side scripting language that allows you to create dynamic web pages. Do you want your website to display search results, upload user files, or manage a database? You’re going to need something like PHP running on your server to create that content dynamically and serve it up to your users.

MySQL is a popular database system, along with others like MariaDB and MongoDB. A database allows you to store and manage data on your web server. Data like user credentials, product inventories, and blog posts are all stored in databases on the backend of a website.

The combination of PHP and MySQL (or a similar database system) is incredibly powerful and is a prerequisite for a lot of other web applications for blogging, e-commerce, and more.

WordPress hosting

Many of the biggest sites on the internet are all just WordPress blogs under the hood, so WordPress hosting is a service that many web hosts offer. While WordPress hosting is generally a paid service, the WordPress software is free. So, if you have a web host with PHP and MySQL, you can just install WordPress yourself for free.

Although this is a bit more work than being handed a site with WordPress pre-installed, installing it yourself is pretty straightforward, and there are a ton of tutorials and walkthroughs out there if you run into any problems. And this initial investment of time will make updating your website in the future much easier.

Cloud services

Cloud computing is a flexible and scalable way to do a lot of complicated things on the server side of your website. If adding PHP to your site is like turning your static drawing into a flipbook, adding cloud services is like turning it into a Pixar movie. You could use cloud services to build a mobile app, create an online game, stream video, perform analytics, and pretty much anything else you could think of.

One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is its scalability. If the website you host on your home server suddenly goes viral and starts getting a thousand times more traffic than normal, your server’s going to crash, and all those new users are going to be disappointed. If the app you host in the cloud gets the same spike in traffic, you can just pay your cloud service to spin up the resources you need to handle it, and your users won’t know the difference.

Of course, your resources on a free plan from AWS or Cloudflare are going to be very limited in the number of requests, the amount of compute time, and other resources that it provides. Still, this can be a great way to dip your toes into the highly technical world of cloud computing or to simply create a cloud-based lab for your own projects.

And if your site does manage to go viral, at least you have the option of scaling up if you want to.

Our verdict

Since the days of GeoCities and Angelfire back in the 90s, there have been ways for average internet users to create their own websites for free. These sites were not always easy on the eyes, but you got what you paid for.

Fortunately, there are a few more options for free web hosting these days. For all your basic website needs, we recommend InfinityFree’s incredibly flexible free hosting. If your site needs cloud services, you’d best go with the free tier from AWS. And if you just need a blog, you can get a nice, professional-looking one up and running in a matter of minutes on Medium.

Author -

Peter Christiansen writes about telecom policy, communications infrastructure, satellite internet, and rural connectivity for HighSpeedInternet.com. Peter holds a PhD in communication from the University of Utah and has been working in tech for over 15 years as a computer programmer, game developer, filmmaker, and writer. His writing has been praised by outlets like Wired, Digital Humanities Now, and the New Statesman.

Editor - Jessica Brooksby

Jessica loves bringing her passion for the written word and her love of tech into one space at HighSpeedInternet.com. She works with the team’s writers to revise strong, user-focused content so every reader can find the tech that works for them. Jessica has a bachelor’s degree in English from Utah Valley University and seven years of creative and editorial experience. Outside of work, she spends her time gaming, reading, painting, and buying an excessive amount of Legend of Zelda merchandise.