Is Free Cloud Hosting Any Good?
Free cloud hosting services are better than traditional web hosting because cloud hosting providers use multiple virtual cloud servers in many locations, offer maximum redundancy, and have amazing scalability.
Most top-quality providers have a free trial period, where you can test the services for one or more months before you have to commit to a plan. In these free trials, you will be able to test out the provider’s uptime and reliability, web-building features, WordPress features, customer support, and so on. This way, you won’t have to rely on the experience of others and will be able to decide for yourself whether the provider satisfies your needs.
Free cloud hosting is a great choice for small, one-time projects that do not require a lot of resources because these hosting plans are usually quite limited, and you will not have access to many resources. So, if you want to run a website for a while, or check whether having a website is something you want, or you only need a website to collect data and then shut it down, free cloud hosting is the solution for you.
However, for a more serious, long-term project, it would be best for you to get an affordable hosting plan from top-quality providers.
What to Look For in the Best Free Cloud Hosting Services?
- Multiple Server Locations – the more data centers and server locations a provider has, the higher the quality of its services will be. The top cloud providers have vast networks of servers globally that work together. This means that your website will be hosted on a server closest to your location, ensuring minimal downtime and latency issues.
- Scalability – one of the most important factors for the growth of your website is scalability. If the provider you choose doesn’t offer good scalability options, your website will crash as soon as you generate more traffic, which limits its growth significantly.
- Resources – it’s really important to consider the number of resources you have access to when choosing a cloud hosting service. And although free cloud hosting services offer very limited resources, most top-quality providers offer just enough resources so that you can test the service.
- Uptime and Reliability – most top-quality cloud providers offer great performance and speed because they use state-of-the-art, reliable, redundant servers. Moreover, they have excellent uptime guarantees, ensuring you experience minimal downtime.
- Customer Support – whether you’re a newbie or an expert, customer support is a crucial component that will impact you and your website. Usually, the best cloud hosting providers offer 24/7 support for all plans, but that’s not always the case for free cloud hosting. So, it’s highly important to check the availability of the support team and the channels through which you can reach them.
- Developer-Friendly – if you need a provider that will make the process of developing an app easier and more efficient, you need to look for a cloud hosting service that provides excellent advanced features and a developer-friendly environment. Usually, most of the top-quality providers offer such services.
3 Cheap Cloud Hosting Alternatives
Free cloud hosting is not suitable for most users as it is quite limited where resources are concerned. So, unless you want to run a test website or a simple short-term project, you should definitely look into cheap cloud hosting alternatives. Our experts have researched and chosen the top three cloud hosting providers that will provide you with an amazing service for a cheap price.
HostArmada – Amazing All-In-One Cloud Hosting Service
HostArmada offers one of the most extensive cloud hosting services for amazing prices. It is a great solution for anyone that’s looking for a user-friendly, reliable, and blazing-fast provider that offers excellent features, like SSD storage, free domain, free SSL, and free website transfer. So, if you’re looking for cloud WordPress, shared, VPS, or reseller hosting, we recommend you check out HostArmada and choose the best plan for you and your website.
Verpex – Cheapest Cloud Web Hosting on the Market
Verpex offers arguably the cheapest cloud web hosting plans out of all top-quality providers on the market. It is a highly flexible provider that offers excellent features, including SSD storage, LiteSpeed web servers, cPanel, free migrations, and daily backups in its web cloud hosting offer, which starts at $0.50 per month. Additionally, if you don’t like its services, you can use its 45-day money-back guarantee to get a full refund.
FastComet – Best Value for Money
FastComet offers amazing plans for all types of businesses, from the smallest to the largest. Its cloud hosting plans include a myriad of outstanding features and extras, like cPanel with Softaculous, Cloudflare CDN, SSL Certificates, one-click WordPress installation, proactive support, and instant setup. One of the best things about FastComet, and the reason why it made it to our list, is that it offers these features and many more for an amazing price, starting at $2.95 per month.
The Limitations and Risks of Free Cloud Hosting
All free services come with certain risks and limitations, and cloud hosting is no exception. The real question is whether free cloud services are worth it, despite the limitations and risks. However, before we dive into the details of the limitations and risks of free cloud hosting deals, it’s important to emphasize that if you want a long-term website for an important project, it would be best if you got a paid service with top-quality performance and excellent features.
Now, with that in mind, let’s see what limits and risks are associated with free cloud hosting services.
Downtime
Free cloud hosting services tend to be quite unstable, even if you sign up for a free deal with the best providers. And because free services are unstable, this means that you will experience outages, downtime, and latency issues quite frequently. Even if the provider you sign up for has a 99.95% uptime or above, you shouldn’t expect this to apply to free plans. These issues will affect your website a lot, and you can lose website visitors and SEO, and your website will not be able to handle larger traffic.
Additionally, you will have slower loading speeds, resulting in many unsatisfied customers who will most likely not return because no one wants to wait a lot for a website to load. Moreover, the majority of free cloud hosting providers do not extend downtime compensation to free cloud hosting users.
Non-Branded Subdomain
Also, if you use a free cloud hosting plan, your URL will probably contain the name of the free cloud hosting provider you use, and it would look something like this: yourwebsitename.thecloudhostingname.com. Customers and Google will link your website to other neighboring sites, which means that if even one of them is fraudulent or has had privacy or similar issues, people and Google will think that you are also that type of website. This will result in you losing customers and SEO rankings.
Of course, this might not be of concern to you if you do not care too much for the website or if you need it for testing or something casual. However, if you are serious about it and want to have a quality website, this can definitely hurt your and your website’s reputation.
Resource Restrictions
Another quite significant limitation is the resource restrictions that come with virtually all free cloud hosting plans. Since most providers offer free plans to get you to sign up for the paid plans, you will have limited storage, bandwidth, RAM, etc.
This will greatly limit the growth of your website and the amount of traffic it can handle. And when you realize this, you will be tempted to sign up for a paid plan. However, if this is your case, we advise you to carefully consider all options before you choose and not continue with that free cloud hosting provider out of convenience (unless you are satisfied with the service, of course).
Limited Features
Aside from resource restrictions, you will also get limited features with a free cloud hosting plan. One of the features that will be limited are the security features, which could get your website hacked and your data leaked. This has also happened with paid hosting, but the risk of it happening on a free plan is significantly higher.
Customer Support
Last but not least, free cloud hosting users usually do not get any customer support. This is because customer support staff has to be paid, and since the provider is not making money off you, it will want to invest too many resources in your plan. So, if you are a newbie and don’t know much about hosting, getting a paid plan, which comes with 24/7 customer support, would be better.