How to read any hosting comparison

Almost every “best free hosting” article is affiliate content, ranked by commission rather than quality. This one has no affiliate links, and it recommends competitors where they are the better answer.

Before the list, a note on the genre. Hosting affiliate commissions are unusually large — frequently £50–£150 per signup, sometimes more — which means comparison content in this niche is overwhelmingly written to convert rather than to inform. The ordering of most “top 10 free hosts” lists reflects payout rates.

Two practical tells. If every option links out with a tracking parameter, the ranking is commercial. And if no entry has a clearly stated downside, it is advertising rather than analysis.

Traxio is a hosting company, so read this page with that in mind too. What we can offer is that there are no affiliate links here and no payments either way, and that the entries below say plainly where each option beats us.

Genuinely free, indefinitely

These charge nothing on an ongoing basis. That is a real offer and worth taking seriously if your budget is zero.

InfinityFree is the strongest of the permanently-free PHP hosts. You get PHP, MySQL, unlimited-in-practice storage, and — unusually — no advertising injected into your pages. You can use your own domain. The limits show up as a daily hits cap and fairly aggressive inactivity suspension, and the control panel is a custom one rather than cPanel or DirectAdmin, so DNS editing and cron are limited or absent. For a hobby project or somewhere to learn, it is genuinely good.

000webhost (run by Hostinger) offers a similar deal at a smaller scale — 300MB storage, 3GB bandwidth, PHP and MySQL, your own domain supported. The free tier historically included forced daily downtime windows, so check current terms. Treat it as a testing environment rather than somewhere to host anything you care about.

The honest assessment: both work. What you give up is the professional control panel, the resource headroom, and any expectation of stability — free tiers get restructured or withdrawn regularly, and you have no standing when they do.

Free for static sites, and very good at it

If your site does not need PHP or a database, this category is the best free hosting available by a comfortable margin, and better than anything paid at the budget end.

GitHub Pages serves static sites straight from a repository. Free, reliable, custom domains supported, HTTPS included. Deployment is a git push. If you already use git, this is difficult to beat.

Netlify adds build pipelines, form handling, serverless functions and preview deployments on a free tier that is generous enough for most personal projects. Excellent developer experience.

Cloudflare Pages is comparable, with Cloudflare's CDN in front, which makes it very fast globally.

The catch: all three are static only. No PHP, no MySQL, and no email on your domain — so a contact form needs a third-party service, and you will need Google Workspace or similar for mail. If your site is a portfolio, documentation, or anything built with Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll or Astro, use one of these rather than shared hosting. We would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

Free hosted platforms

WordPress.com's free tier gets you publishing in minutes with no maintenance at all. The trade is significant: their advertising appears on your pages, plugins and custom themes are restricted, and your address carries their brand unless you upgrade. For a personal journal that is fine; for anything you intend to grow it is the subdomain problem in a different wrapper.

Blogger still exists, is still free, and still supports custom domains. Dated, but stable and genuinely zero-maintenance.

Notion, Carrd and similar cover single pages and simple sites well. Worth knowing about if your requirement is smaller than a whole website.

Free trials, which is a different thing

Worth separating out, because “free trial” and “free tier” get conflated constantly and they behave very differently.

A trial gives you the complete product for a fixed period and then charges. A free tier gives you a reduced product indefinitely. Neither is better; they suit different situations. A trial makes sense when you want to evaluate what you would actually be using. A free tier makes sense when you genuinely will never pay.

The thing to check on any trial is whether card details are required up front. If they are, the offer depends partly on people forgetting to cancel, and you should set a reminder. If they are not, the trial is what it says it is.

Traxio is in this category: 30 days of the full product, no card details required to start, then £0.99 a month if you continue. We do not describe it as free hosting without qualification, because it is not.

How to evaluate a free host before committing

Free tiers change frequently and the marketing rarely reflects current reality. Five checks worth doing before you build anything.

Read the actual limits, not the headline. Find the storage figure, the bandwidth figure, and any daily hit cap. If a page says “unlimited”, look for the fair-use clause — it exists, and the real number is in it.

Check the inactivity policy. Many free hosts suspend or delete accounts that go quiet for 30 to 90 days. If your site is seasonal or low-traffic, this catches people out badly.

Confirm you can export. Can you download your files and a database dump without paying? If the answer is unclear, assume no, and treat anything you build there as temporary.

Look for the advertising clause. Search the terms for “advertis”. Some free hosts reserve the right to place ads even if they do not currently do so.

Search for recent user reports. Not review sites — those are affiliate-driven too. Reddit and forum threads from the last six months give you a much more accurate picture of downtime and support responsiveness.

Red flags worth walking away from

A short list of things that reliably indicate a bad experience ahead, regardless of price.

“Unlimited everything” with no stated fair-use policy. Every host has limits. One unwilling to state them is planning to apply them unpredictably.

No visible company details. A hosting provider with no registered company name, address or jurisdiction anywhere on the site is one you have no recourse against.

Aggressive countdown timers on pricing. The “offer ends in 4:59” banner that resets on refresh is a reasonable proxy for how the rest of the relationship will go.

No clear renewal price. If you cannot find what you will pay in year two without starting a checkout, that is deliberate.

Charging for SSL. Certificates have been free via Let's Encrypt since 2016. A host still billing for basic SSL is either running very old infrastructure or relying on customers not knowing.

Which should you actually pick?

Reduced to the decision you are probably making:

Static site and comfortable with git? GitHub Pages, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages. Better than any shared host for this, free, and not close.

Need PHP and MySQL, budget is strictly zero? InfinityFree. Accept the custom panel and the caps.

Want to write and never maintain anything? WordPress.com, and budget for the upgrade if the advertising bothers you.

Want a real control panel and your own domain for a few pounds a year? This is the gap Traxio aims at, and there is an honest comparison that lays out where we lose.

Site earns money or downtime costs you? None of the above. Pay £5–£15 a month for a host with real support and an SLA. This is the recommendation people most often ignore and most often regret ignoring.