When I first got my new website (this one) through WordPress.com, the domain registration and the domain mapping was already costing me $18 per year. As a poor college student, that’s a lot of money. Not wanting to pay for hosting, I eschewed paid hosting and went with 000webhost.com.

Now after a few weeks, I look back on the free hosting experience. At first I was very happy to have found a free web host that *gasp* actually worked! In my mind, I did not think such a service existed.

However, setting up this website and importing blog posts over revealed to me the messier and more unpleasant side of free hosting. When I was uploading the WordPress setup files, the website FTP would behave very strangely. It didn’t take long before I realized the problem. The time-out was about a minute; in other words, after a minute of inactivity, the FTP server would automatically disconnect you, without giving you a message. As far as I looked, there was no way to change this limit. To this day, I am still resorting to reconnecting every time I have to upload a file.

The FTP weirdness was the least of my problems, though. Installing WordPress returned me with numerous PHP errors; whose fault they were I cannot determine. It took two more re-installs of WordPress before it worked without error.

Next up was the process of importing over all of my previous blog’s data. This, indeed, turned out to be the most difficult part, enormously complicated by 000webhost’s batshit-crazy 2 MB limit on upload file-sizes. What year are they living in, 1996? Perhaps someone should wake them up to reality, since 2 megabytes is hardly enough data to fit a high-resolution image these days!

What made this fact even worse, was that my blog’s exported data file was 275 kilobytes too big. So close yet so far, I had to do something about the extra 275 kilobytes. For the next hour or so, I manually edited the XML file, getting rid of unnecessary posts and pages. But all of that was to no avail. At the end, I took drastic measures, fitting all of the XML code on one line which got it through the crazy-narrow pipe just in time to discover… yet ANOTHER error! This time, it was something about the XML format being invalid. I wasn’t surprised. All of the reduction and compacting that I had to do could’ve resulted in a hanging tag or a misplaced character. Great.

Luckily, however, I discovered that on the exports page, I could export small portions of my blog at a time. Thus, I broke up my blog into 8 different pieces, and uploaded the pieces one by one. I shouldn’t have had to do that in the first place, had the limit not been so stringent.

Just when the first piece of my blog finished uploading, another PHP error out of the blue!

Warning: set_time_limit() has been disabled due to security reasons…

This webhost just hates me or something! They have a seriously outdated installation of PHP that they refuse to upgrade, and on top of that, they won’t even let you use basic functions! Well then!

Unfortunately for them I was a lot smarter. I dug deep into the WordPress source code and removed this one line of offending code in the php file:

set_time_limit(0);

The rest of my blog import worked like a charm after that. Shame to 000webhost for putting in so many restrictions.

That was basically the bulk of my worries. I still struggle daily with getting the website FTP to cooperate with me, as it seems to have a minute-long attention span. After one minute of inactivity, it automatically disconnects you. What’s strange is that, you can upload files, but if you want to access a directory, good luck.

On the brighter side though, at least the webhost works. They have good uptime as they claim, and a huge support forum that helped me get through all the mess of importing my blog. The control panel for the website gives you great control over your website. What I really like is having my personal email address, main@g-liu.com. It’s a lot more professional-looking than, say, a @gmail.com address. Unlike Gmail though, each email account only allows you a puny 20 megabytes of storage space, hardly enough space for 10 hi-res pictures.

One option I have not tried yet: 000webhost’s paid hosting options. I’m not sure that I ever will, after getting such a terrible first impression from the company. At $4.84/mo., however, it is relatively cheaper compared to other hosts.

The Conclusion?

Rating: 6/10

Explanation: While 000webhost.com does its job providing a good website control panel and good uptime, is definitely not “better than paid hosting.” I would suggest that they find another slogan before they get sued for false advertising. There are many problems that they need to fix; the wildly out-of-date PHP version and the ridiculously short FTP timeouts being the most annoying ones.

Obviously, the biggest plus to this web host is that it’s free. All you need is your own domain, and you’re good to go. 000webhost is a great option if you’re on a tight budget, but if you’re willing to pour in some more money into a website, a paid host is definitely your better option.