Why Free Hosting Fails.

[manipulate]

Why Free Hosting Fails
By iintens - brought to you by the iintens blog.

I see a lot of you guys/girls setting up your little forum on 'free hosts'; people even advertising 'free hosts' and saying they are the best host.
I decided to write an article on why these hosts simply wont do for running a functional site without having problems with everything; from restricted PHP configurations to poor quality service.

Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is a neat little thing Apache thought up a while ago; basically it means you can host more than one site on the same IP address/port using the same apache process using a 'host' header in the HTTP protocal; ALL free web hosting companies use this to allow thousands of sites to be hosted on the same server.
With each site hosted; more and more resources are taken up on the server; meaning overall slower service to the people that are viewing your site; free hosting servers someitmes host thousands of sites on one server; and stuff can get REALLY slow...
As well as shared hosting being a pain in the butt; it is rather insecure to use...for you see if one site on a shared hosting server is vulnerable; it renders ALL sites on the server vulnerable, if somebody found an exploit in one site on a shared hosting server that enables them to upload a PHP shell to an old MyBB forum that somebody used to run and forgot about; with some effort they could get into every site on the server; you do the math..over one thousand sites on a server...there are some serious chances that one or more sites on every free shared hosting server is vulnerable..meaning YOUR site is vulnerable.
I also forgot to tell you that most payed hosts use shared hosting aswell; but it isn't as bad as using FREE shared hosting; because most people that bother to pay for hositng often are intelligent enough to secure their content; and they also try and keep their sites per server ratio to about 100 (At least at every shared host i've used).

Limited Apache/PHP Configurations
In this day and age; most sites use a neat programming language called PHP; basically PHP makes sites dynamic; It's pretty much used everywhere now, most phishers use some form of PHP to grab the password from the victim; and since free hosts are a target for skiddies making thier first phishers; FREE hosts often make strict changes to their Apache and PHP configurations to try and stop phishers from putting phishers on their server; I remember a few weeks ago I was trying my code on a free host and as soon as I tried to view it; I got a page complaining about some of my code being similar to the same as the front page of MySpace.com :|.

Slow!
As I said aboe; FREE hosts often put hundreds of sites on each server; each servers connection is usually limited by the connection they are given and/or the cabling the hosting company uses to get your stuff to the outside world; you might think that a BIG server with a big connection will easilly handle sending a few KBs of data to some computers; but it actually all adds up when you consider there is thousands of sites on your server; and that there are probably a few thousand servers in the datacentre where the server is that your site is hosted on; all that traffic has to travel through routers and switches that can overload from time to time. Another point is that Apache recieving connections, finding the appropriate virtual host out of a list of thousands to get the requested data from, passing any PHP code to the PHP interpriter to be processed, PHP connecting to a MySQL server and executing MySQL commands found in the code, and finally sending the data off to be viewed by the clients computer DOES require processing power; once again you do the math; this happening for over a thousand sites per server will slow things down A LOT.
Now days companies are putting limits to how much RAM/CPU/Bandwidth your site can use at a time; going back to the 1000 sites per server thing...they USUALLY make these limits very tight; if you actually DID get a lot of traffic on your site stuff could get a little complicated.

Support
Customer Support reps for free hosting services probably have to put up with dumbass questions all day; people starting their first site...too dumb to use google..asking some dude who sits at a desk questions about basic HTML that the dude really shouldn't be answering, they'd eventually get tired of it and start giving crap service to EVERYBODY; even people asking legit questions about the free hosting companies service.

Catches
Okay; You can't get reliable free hosting; this is a fact you wll have to face sooner or later; hard drive space, bandwidth and CPU/RAM time does actually make a mighty big hole in the hosting companies wallets; Hosting companies often try and overcome this by

1. Putting HEAVY advertising on a site.
   
2. Putting as much sites as possible on a server; even if it means poor quality service.
   
3. Using cheap equipment to host free sites on; cheap routers, switches, HDDs.etc can bring down reliability a LOT!
   
4. much more
   

If you have read this far; congratulations...

[Idiot #1]

Thanks but still think free host are good for starting out.

[Grizzly]

Free hosts are OK for starting out, if you get your own domain. If you're using a subdomain off them then it is fail. No one will take your site seriously. If you find a free host that gives you full FTP access, allows you to use your own domain, doesn't place ANY ads on your site, then, maybe it won't be so much fail in it.

[maxpower]

ya free hosting sites are crap,as good to be true!!!!!

[DAMINK™]

Great post. Worth reading if your starting out.

[manipulate]

Sure it won't be as shitty, but as I pointed out most of them will use dodgy Apache/PHP configurations and the over-use of shared hosting is a pain when you have a medium/large site.

[ßeowulf]

The thing is, some people just don't want to/can't afford a decent web host. Personally, I know a couple excellent free web hosts but I do agree with you that there are limitations.

[Omniscient]

Free hosts have their place imho. Even I have a couple accounts floating around but in general they are a nightmare to deal with and extremely unreliable.

However many teens have no choice but to use these free alternatives. I suggest heavily that you make backups and be prepared for downtime.

If possible ask your parents for $50 a year to buy hosting. It's worth a shot since $50 ain't a lot of money and you might be able to work it off with chores or side jobs for neighbors.

[manipulate]

I got my first shared hosting package with 1and1, it was like $2 a month and my parents didn't mind at all- Now I just get VPSs because I can't stand all the fancy 'control-panel-we'll-set-everything-up-for-you-but-you-cant-see-whats-going-on' kinda stuff; 1and1 was much better than the free host but.

[zone]

Free hosts, no doubt, have some importance in the web. They, though are not good and reliable, but have a good experiance for a noob. I will suggest you to aquire a free host, before going for a paid one just to get some experience out, and to make yourself a better understanding in the future plans.