Review: Free Website and Web Hosting from 000WebHost.com

In today’s world, if you have an idea you want to get out to the public, one of the best things you can do is build a website. 000webhost.com is a free online service that allows you to build and host your own website for free. It is tailored to those that may have an idea for their website but have little to no computer or coding knowledge. The site offers plenty of perks, and a convenient and self-explanatory walkthrough as soon as you log on and get your idea running.

I am going to share with you my experience setting up a site using 000webhost.com and my review of this service.

000webhost boasts a variety of benefits to its free users all make the site helpful to first time and experienced web designers.

Offering two domains with 99 percent uptime guarantee, 10GB of bandwidth per month, and 1GB of disk space to use, amateur web designers should have plenty to work with. One of the bigger perks that may go unnoticed by those new to web design is the full support of PHP & MySQL databases, offering the ability to develop your site in two different scripting languages. The combination of both offers an almost limitless amount of options when it comes to what kind of site you want and how you want to build it.

The site offers a convenient and self-explanatory walkthrough to help you get started. Immediately after logging on, a window appears asking your level of expertise and offering help to anyone that needs it.

From here it takes you to what is truly your starting point for creating your website. With three options at the bottom to choose from: using their website builder wizard, creating a WordPress site, or uploading your own site. With varying level of difficulty, the website builder is the easiest with yet another walkthrough to go with it. Uploading the website is the hardest, simply because it involves creating a fully functioning website elsewhere, saving it, and uploading the code to be hosted on this site. That’s great if you just want to change a domain name or find a new host, but it’s a little complicated if you’re making one from the ground up. The WordPress and create your own options are pretty similar, both requiring you to build a site and child pages from the ground up and create your own URL.

If you have experience with web design it can be pretty easy, the way the sizing of the banners, menus, and pictures are set up lends itself to be easily managed by those with even basic knowledge of web design. As long as you know where to look, your tools are all on the top of the screen, accessible with a simple drop-down menu. You can change all the fonts and pictures similar to any tool bar on your standard document writer.

While most of the tools are easy to see and use, some can seem to be hidden due to a few of the site builder’s own banners running into each other. This glitch caught me in an endless loop of trying to publish the page and getting booted back to the main page by accidentally clicking on their logo instead of the Publish drop down menu.

While still decently easy to get used to, if this is your first attempt at building your own site it can seem cumbersome and difficult to walk through. After a little bit of work, the builder did become a lot easier to use and navigate. One of the few consistent problems I found was to redirect from the clients old website to the new one.

The site was good at adding new pages from the navigation bar, but any child pages after that were difficult to add—making it harder than it needed to be to add redirects from other sites or pages that you already have functioning. With a pretty good selection of pictures and background to choose from if you didn’t already have images of your own to add, you have plenty to choose from. If you do have your own pictures, 000webhost makes it easy enough to add them onto the page, and—in most cases—they actually make it easier to use your own pictures as opposed to their preloaded images since you don’t have to search through their library of photos to find one that matches.

When it to comes to how SEO (search engine optimization) friendly the site is, that is yet to be determined. But, the switch did make it easier for keyword targeting on the site and changing from one site onto the other. Another benefit to the switch was the convenience and ease with which the metadata for the site could be updated and changed as needed. This benefit is multiplied if you picked the third option and upload your own site.

The way 000webhost.com presents your options to you, they make it far easier to build the site than to buy the domain name and then use another source for your design. While there wasn’t a great variety of templates, the ones offered were easy enough to modify to your liking. With sufficient time to get used to the layout of the tools and mechanics of the programs, it was simple enough for me to manipulate the size of the webpage I was working on to ensure some variation of design from one page to the next. This could all be arranged from the design page, which is rarer than it sounds.

The end result was a good, strong, functional website built off of a mildly easy-to-use or learn-to-use online builder that comes with a ton of benefits. With a decent amount of storage and disk space to use, and plenty of help building your own site, 000webhost is an easy choice for anyone that is just getting into web design or someone that is a little more seasoned and still wants the advice and ease of using the walkthrough when things get tougher. Even though it has some hangups when it comes to toolbar glitches and a lack of stock images and templates to choose from, overall 000webhost has more than enough going for it to persuade anyone to choose them as a web host.