{"id":2618,"date":"2013-01-06T20:25:49","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T04:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/?p=2618"},"modified":"2013-11-06T21:37:05","modified_gmt":"2013-11-07T04:37:05","slug":"free-web-hosting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/free-web-hosting\/","title":{"rendered":"[Review] Is free web hosting any good?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.
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\nHowever, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, since 2 megabytes is hardly enough data to fit a high-resolution image these days!<\/p>\n

What made this fact even worse, was that my blog’s exported data file was 275 kilobytes<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Just when the first piece of my blog finished uploading, another PHP error out of the blue!<\/p>\n[label type=”warning”]Warning: set_time_limit()<\/code> has been disabled due to security reasons…[\/label]\n

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!<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

set_time_limit(0);<\/code><\/p>\n

The rest of my blog import worked like a charm after that. Shame to 000webhost for putting in so many restrictions.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. It’s a lot more professional-looking than, say, a @gmail.com<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

One option I have not tried yet: 000webhost’s paid hosting<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The Conclusion?<\/h1>\n

Rating<\/strong>: 6\/10<\/p>\n

Explanation<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Zt3y-Ge","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2618"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2618"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3800,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2618\/revisions\/3800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}