Friday, November 9, 2007

Featured Review - Free Web Hosting 000WebHost.com

This post will be interesting for those, who are looking for the free Hosting solution for the Web Site. It is not easy to find an offer that will give you the zero-dollar advertising-free Web Site with subdomains and FTP uploading options. 000Webhost is listed with the high ranking in all directories and fit to all the requirements above. Site provides 250MB of disk space with 100GB Bandwidth, supports various scripts (latest versions of PHP and MySQL with no restrictions), allows your ads, hosts sub-domains (absolutely free for you) and promises to be alive at least to 2012. On top of all these goodies, it pays you for all the referrals you bring to them. 24/7 online support is available as well.I am using this service for several months, and it has never been down.

Please sign up for your free space and sub-domain:
http://www.000webhost.com/?id=3226

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While this post was written back in 2007, and there is overwhelming information from the frustrated users, pointing out that the 000webhost should be avoided, I am not going to modify the post. Just recommendation - before you decide to sign in with them, read all the comments below.

37 comments:

www.MyWebsiteAdviser.com said...

Nice post.

There is free web hosts comparison chart.

Enjoy,
Alex

Charles said...

The article is nice but the free hosting service is not. More and more people end up losing there website information due to reason unexplainable by the site.

Money Making and Blogging Tips

Michael Pekker said...

I personally use 000webhost.com, and I never had any problems with them. However, you are not the first who I heard complains on the site reliability. It is a pity they cannot stabilize the server performance, since in general I like them.

www.MyWebsiteAdviser.com said...

000webhost.com pretty good, but there are better free web host providers. For my opinion, ByetHost is better than 000webhost.

www.MyWebsiteAdviser.com said...

If you can't afford to loose your website, make sure you have updated backup of your website files and database.

Moreover, if your website is important for you, maybe it's time to upgrade to paid web hosting.

You can see here Linux and Windows Recommended Web Host Providers.

BUT! if you use paid web hosting, you still have to do full backups of your website.

Michael Pekker said...

There are definitely better free websites than 000webhost, but nobody pay you referral fees besides 000webhost for spreading a word on a free web hosting :)

www.MyWebsiteAdviser.com said...

000webhost doesn't pay referrals too.

Did you ever receive a penny from them ?

There are a lot of discussions that they never pay for referrals.

Michael Pekker said...

Your guess is right. I did not get any payments from them. But, I never actively promoted the site, and this has never been a part of my business plan.

Anonymous said...

I did promote them a little, I got a few hundred referrals. Unfortunately, they never paid me. Then they banned me when I started to ask questions.

Anyhow, I have plenty of free time, so I am encouraging anyone who has been scammed by 000webhost to file a formal complaint at http://www.ic3.gov

If enough of us complain, 000webhost will be forced to stop stealing traffic from folks like myself who earn a living driving traffic.

Feel free to contact me. derek at infogringo dot com

Michael Pekker said...

Derek, I never put much attention on gaining referrals (I am not good at that, no matter where), but I did got several complains from fellows bloggers on the site technical performance on lack of payments. I am sure You'll get support from community in your actions against unethical aspects of their behavior.

Anonymous said...

they only allow 1 ftp thread at a time, it slow down my works.

Michael Pekker said...

Hi,
It is true, by the host is still free, isn't it?
Do you have any problems with site stability and uptime?

Anonymous said...

Very poor and compounded by questionable business practices.

The lowdown on my experience as a customer/affiliate at

http://linkbee.com/H76B

Hope this helps some people avoid a potentially costly mistake.

Michael Pekker said...

Hi Maurice,
I read your post on 000Webhost and have to admit that your unsatisfaction is completely justifiable. If you review the comments before, you will notice that there were other users' concerns on the site reliability and referrals reimbursement business practices. I do have site with this provider, but it was not updated for long time, and I do not actually monitor its performance. The amount of negative feedbacks, both online and offline let me support your suggestion to avoid this provider completely. There are still other free hosting solutions on the market, so there is no point to stick to the bad and unreliable one.
Thanks for your feedback!
I am lowering the site rating on my RateItAll rating list to 2, which makes the average rating for it just 1.6 from 5. You can review other offers for free web hosting (over 100 sites on the list):
http://www.rateitall.com/t-25717-free-web-hosting-sites.aspx

Leonard said...

000webhost is a COMPLETE SCAM! BEWARE!

http://www.mrlen.com/forums/index.php/board,38.0.html

Please post your complaints on my forums. 000webhost owes me money and if you post about it on their forums, they delete it. They don't answer emails, so there's no way to get your commissions.

Tahir Jamil said...

000webhost.com is considered feature rich web hosting. I really like this hosting service. However, I got shock of my life when one of my website http://tuitionacademylahore.co.cc/ disappeared unexpectedly on the reason of low activity. Please note that this website is well submitted to all search engines and having good numbers of daily web traffic.
This manifests that 000webhost.com hosting service lack reliability. Very few hosts delete or suspend accounts due to unknown reasons or lack of activity.  They proved the notion that free hosting of majority of hosting services is unreliable. In my view website should remain over internet permanently unless removed by webmasters themselves. In such circumstances webmaster sudden disappearance or any emergency will result in account deletion.  Websites should remain over internet for ever.

Tahir Jamil said...

Here I want to provide very serious review about 000webhost.com. My review is endorsed by hundreds of customers. 000webhost.com provides very unreliable free hosting. One you get their free hosting 000webhost.com will try their best to make you paid customer. 000webhost.com often let customers purchase domain by these tactics. By the pretext of single complain 000webhost.com will remove your websites. It is the time when there are hundreds of jealous competitors but 000webhost.com does not care about free customers.
000webhost.com told me that they will not remove any of my website if I become their paid customer. So, 000webhost.com free hosting is just a trap to make paid customers. 000webhost.com deleted my account without warning and hijacked my high traffic websites by giving their full page advertisement in place of my removed websites which are provided below.
http://www.pakistanwebdesign.co.cc/
http://www.pakistannewsarticles.co.cc/
http://www.tuitionacademylahore.co.cc/

Kindle said...

99.9% free webhost are stealing traffic from you. $1 dollar hosting is lot better then them

Michael Pekker said...

Free hosting offers might be sometimes better than paid. As you see, I am using the free blogging hosting at Blogger. Yes, host, giving away freebies, has something on his mind. So, the main idea is to define, where is the catch, and decide, is this catch works for you.
It is general observation. 000webhost.com is probably a scam anyway.

sandysite said...

I have written up a more or less detailed recap of my experience with this provider
here: http://000webhost-scam.blogspot.com/
No opinions there, just stating some facts of which I have direct knowledge.

For your own sakes, if you are considering using this hosting provider, take a moment to read that doc. It won't take you long, but may save you a lot of grief in the future.

Michael Pekker said...

Hi Sandysite,
Your blog URL shows clearly your attitude towards 000webhost :)

Chris said...

I tried them out and although the service is user friendly and easy to use, they have been down about two houes yesterday and almost four today. They claim to have 99% up time, but in my opinion that's bull. I'm all set with them. there are far too many hosts on web to stay with a bad one. And to think I even endorsed them on my blog. I feel very embarrassed now.

Michael Pekker said...

Hi Cris,
Same here. I was using the host for my secondary site, which I rarely checked. So, my experience was overly positive. Therefore, as you see, I have featured 000webhost on my blog as well. However, overwhelming evidence piles up, that it is not worth to use them. At first, I gave them the highest rating at RateItAll rating list (http://www.rateitall.com/t-25717-free-web-hosting-sites.aspx) as well, but later downgraded to very low one. But... do not feel embarassed. Let the site host feel embarassed from customer low satisfaction rate.

Chris said...

I completely agree with you about this service. Furthermore, there affiliate program is an aoutright scam. they promise $5 for each person you can get to sign up on their site. I had written about them on my blog hoping to make some referral money and then buy the $5 hosting they offer. I had at least 3 of my readers e-mail me and let me know they signed up under my referral link. Those are the ones that I know of. I'm sure there were more. Yet, 000webhost.com claims I still have 0 referrals. What a scam!

Unknown said...

Nice blog. I liked it.its excellent,Really i loved read this blog.Its highly informative. I would be visiting your blog hereafter regularly to gather valuable information
Web Hosting

Web Hosting India said...

Hello,
Nice blog about web hosting i like it
The Internet, website, blog posts, e-presence, webpage - these are the buzzwords that define a company's online presence and everyone wants to get on board on this massively growing virtual world. Who wouldn't, when the opportunity to expose one's products or services to the entire world is presented to them? This is what the Internet has done - provide a platform on which anyone can get his or her own space on the World Wide Web.

Anonymous said...

i have a question.000webhost really send you $5 dollars by each sign up?

Michael Pekker said...

I personally never got my share of the wealth. There are many complaints online, including the comments above, where users complain the payment has not been sent.

www.MyWebsiteAdviser.com said...

No, they never pay...

I can tell you more, big and good webhosting providers like powweb and hostgathor don't pay affiliate fees either. They cancel your pending fee without any notice. If you ask them why they took money back, they have 2 answers: Customer canceled the hosting or customer's credit card wasn't valid.

Anonymous said...

http://freewebhostreview.blogspot.com/2011/04/httpwww000webhostcom-review.html

SEO Services said...

Choosing a good web hosting provider is so important for your online business that you have to make your decision seriously.
Thanks for sharing.

Anonymous said...

I will tell you here the experience I had with 000webhost free service.
At first time it was great, I installed wordpress and a WP template for some friend that is photographer and wanted a website. All the features worked great, it was very faster the service. You don't have autoinstaller, but is ok because you can do it manually (it is not a big deal).
The bad things started later.
- Once we found we haven't the database. They moved web sites to other servers, so our database (mysql) was empty. After some support tickets we recovered it.
- The big problem was a few days ago when they suspended us the account because a term of service violation "Suspended (Account sent more than 1000 email messages and only gets 0 visitors per day. This overloads our mail server. If you need to send more emails and to get your account re-activated, please upgrade to our premium UNLIMITED hosting". We don't have idea why this happened, we don't have emails in 000webhosting.
We CAN'T ACCESS to any feature from the Control Panel, to make a backup of the website. Also the ftp not shows our data (it is empty , just the root).
So, the only solution they provide us was to upgrade to a payed account, not just for the service, TO RECOVER OUR DATA!!

Michael Pekker said...

I feel really bad when businesses professionals apply such unhealthy business practices.

Look what happens with 000WebHost.com. They have multiple negative feedbacks and comments, and there are no changes, not at all. The stream of complaints is steady - just check - it is all over Internet. But, the site owners do not change, since they are fine with drawing new customers all the time. Internet is growing so fast, that some companies may decide to focus on newcomers, and not on ongoing support of the existing customers.

Anonymous said...

Nice post and great comments!

I still think many people here get mistaken so please allow me to share my experience and advises.

First I would suggest anyone building a site with a database (like Wordpress, Joomla, etc) to go for a cheap (but not free) hosting. Same when owners plan to be paid for referrals. Remember that when anyone offers you something free, he might take the right to do whatever he wants. Why can you complain? After all it's free!

000Webhost is a free trial for the hosting company called Hosting24. They offer you a free hosting but they expect you to switch to Hosting24 after 2 or 3 months. This is business and free means trial. Hosting24 is in fact a BlueHost reseller.

But yes for the first 3 months 000WebHost worked alright for me until I noticed that they had added some lines of code in my footer pages to track my readers.
This is a bit boring as you feel your site is kind of hacked and also it slightly slows down the pages display.

Then after 6 months I suddenly had a huge advertising popup (648x455px) for their free hosting service displaying on all my pages.
Have a look here at their ad popup: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/43/z000webhostadvertisingp.gif/

So yes it did still work but who wants to use a service with people adding code on pages and showing ad popups when they announce everywhere "Ads Free".
And think of your readers. With such huge popups, I doubt they will often come back. It makes your site looks very cheap and amateurish :-(

So my conclusion is that free hosting like 000webhost is just good for someone who is wishing to try a few new pages for a limited time and that's it.
Do NOT expect anything else as these are the limits of free!
As I said there are quite a few very cheap but reliable hosting companies. I found ServerSea quite cheap and after 4 years I am still using their service. If you think I am part of their business (which is not the case), try any other cheap hosting companies but PAY something for it.
Understand that if free means no cost for you, it also means they can take the freedoom to do whatever they want with your data (like displaying popups, adding tracking code, etc...). You are not a customer unless you pay something!

Hope this helps :-)
Paul

Michael Pekker said...

Hi Paul,

Thank you for detailed review. I agree that every company means profits in mind, otherwise that would not be a business model. But there are multiple ways to generate profit on offering free services, else that would not be so many of them on the Internet. Some webhosting providers put their ads, other ask you to get referrals, and so on. Most people complain not on the announced conditions, but on the wrong promises, and deception of their users. I am a customer support manager myself, and I deal with much more expensive deals with my customers. My concept – under-promise but over-deliver. It might be not always right, but at least customer expectations are properly aligned with received goods and services.

Zoltan Farkas said...

I have used 000webhost till now. It seemed good in first month. Than sometimes started some pause in mailing.

If I asked technical support they always apologized and recommended me to upgrade my account. And unfortunately it was happened more and more often. Last week the pause took more than 2 days and again the force recommendation is for upgrading and apology is for technical problem.

That was the last straw that broke the camel's back. If it is a characteristic of their service, it is not good. If it is the habit of their marketing (force to upgrade) it is more worse.
Don't waste your time! At last you will go away or pay. And you can find better hosting with pay plans.

Not good job!

Unknown said...

I have written up a more or less detailed recap of my experience with this provider
here: http://000webhost-best.blogspot.com/

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