Free Web Hosting Area

So, what are the advantages and disadvantages to this?

most free hosting services place banner adds at the top and bottom of your pages.

you want to drive traffic TO your site, not give it distractions that steer it AWAY from your site with links to other sites, other offers, irrelevant or questionable ads, etc.

that's the downsize.

on the upside, its free. of course, so is google, but you don't get your own free domain type address.

i've used 20mm.com and google sites, but went with MEwebhost.com. They handled the original site for Caveman v1.x, with the demos on a server from RackSpace.com.

its tough to beat MEwebhost and rackspace when it comes to professional service at rock bottom prices.

i think i pay five to ten bucks a month or something like that. demos are hosted on dropbox for free, so i no longer need my own dedicated box at rackspace to handle the demo download bandwidth demand.

in fact, MEwebhost, verizon wireless, and electricity are my ONLY project related expenses for Caveman 3.0 or any of my other game projects.

Well I've never heard of it.

Generally you get what you pay for with hosting and I advise paying $5 a month or so for a small virtual server somewhere like digital ocean instead of free deals as you'll very quickly outgrow a free host and encounter limitations.

I have three places to host. Firstly a dedicated server at a Co location facility in Canada which I pay $59 CA per month for, a $5 per month virtual server at digital ocean and a server in my house I just pay electric and high speed Internet for. For my uptime critical sites I use the high end hosting and for irc stuff I use the $5 server. For my games website and downloads which are 71mb I self host at home. All have advantages and disadvantages. If you can afford the electricity self hosting is generally better than a free Web host.

Good luck!

Read the fine print a few times.

In the "old days" free hosting sites would claim ownership of anything that was hosted on their servers.

Free or too-cheap-to-be-true providers tend to come and go at the drop of a hat, and when they do, you'll be left holding the bag.

Once upon a time I used to pay $1/month for a pretty epic hosting package from 1portfolio. Then there was an entire week where no one could reach my site because they were having traffic problems, and these days its an even bet whether their own website is reachable on a given day...

These days I pay somewhere around $5/month for an account from HostMonster, and I haven't had a problem in several years of use.

I'm on Dreamhost for $11.95/mo and they'll credit you a year-long domain registration to boot if you sign on for a year. Haven't had a single problem with them. They offer generous storage and bandwidth to start, and I'm not sure they're still doing it but back since I started hosting with them they increase your storage/bandwidth quota as a loyalty incentive.

I haven't used a free webhost since the days of AngelFire. I was on a bargain hosting plan once for two bucks a month -- at once point I used their web-form to renew my domain, and lo-and-behold, it lapsed and was snapped up by a domain squatter. When I contacted the guy, he said "Oh, yeah, you used the link to our *old* payment processor, that hasn't been hooked up in years, we never got the order, and we can't even get the money you paid". They offered no recourse, not even a proper apology or explanation why their payment page was so out of date. When I suggested that they should help get me my domain back by helping to file the proper forms, the dude said he could do it but the billing rate is $500 an hour. Basically they fucked up horribly, lost me my domain, and then refused to take any responsibility for it. It took two years before the domain squatter lapsed on the registration and I was able to get my own damn domain back.

Beware that you get what you pay for, and especially beware of any service that's priced so innexpensively that it makes better financial sense to lose you as a happy customer over problems than to, you know, just fix the problem.

In addition to all of the problems mentioned above, free or very cheap hosting can often serve your pages slower and may be missing features of you're looking to do more than just serve static content.

Most of the above advice has been general or based on experiences worth other free or low cost services, so I thought I'd take a quick look at this specific service.

Firstly, only "small sites" can be hosted for free without ads. "Medium and large" sites will either have ads displayed or you'll need to pay. The fact that they don't actually specify what qualifies as "small" is not ideal.

Next up, you can't upload any individual file bigger than 10mb. This may be problematic if you want to host your game, trailers, etc.

Thirdly, their terms of service are filled with different things that can cause your files, entire site, or even whole account to be deleted without warning. I don't think I need to explain why this might be a problem.


I'd much rather pay a small amount to have a more reliable service where my site is less likely to just randomly disappear without notice.

Not meaning to sound harsh, but what do you mean by having "absolutely no budget"? Surely you can spare like $20 a year if you take your work and effort seriously? You can use a single site for multiple projects. Not having a method of payment (like a credit card or paypal account) is a different real issue in many countries (mine included).

From my experience free web hosting can be good. I'm currently using http://gigarank.net for my hobby project and it has worked great so far. The bandwidth limits are spelled out and is easy to keep track of in the CPanel and it doesn't have stupid file size limits (only total).

You also need to check for arbitrary file type limits too. In the bad old days free hosts used to ban hosting of exe files, mp3 and media and more presumably to prevent warez sites. I don't know if this is still prevalent and I haven't used free hosting since 1999.

Many of the critiques I see in this thread do not make that much sense. Obviously, if you want to host trailers, you will put them on YouTube, not on a free web host. And from other indie devs that I've seen, you will put your game files on DropBox. Even the large game companies do the same thing; they put files on something like Amazon Cloud Services, because those services are specialized to store large amounts of data and deliver them to clients quickly.

The real drawback to using a free host is that they don't make your website for you. It takes time to make and maintain a website, and that time could better be spent working on your games. You can use the simpler route and have something like a Facebook page for your project.

Once you have made your company into a business, making any profit, you can put some of that profit into a website and it will be tax deductible. Before that, is it really necessary to have a website? If you really want a site, then chat with your friend who already has a dreamhost or godaddy account, and he will probably host your site for free until you get bigger. I make my friends' websites and host them on my dreamhost account because it's an unlimited hosting plan, but they need to pay for the domain name.

I don't know about everyone else but it's rare these days that I do friends a favour and give free hosting. I didn't get it for free so it has to be covered somewhere and if you give someone free hosting and for example their site takes you over your quota, comes under ddos attack, or infringes copyright it is you as the bill payer who is directly affected and that can put a strain on any friendship. It's just not worth it, hosting is so affordable you can just go and get paid virtual servers for near nothing these days.

It is not true at all that you can build a site after you're established. A strong Web presence must be built from day one to be noticed, simply having a YouTube channel and a link to a download on amazon cloud, and some crummy Mygame.freesitehostinglol.com domain doesn't cut the mustard in 2015, ask any SEO professional.

I've been doing Web design professionally for years and dealing directly with site ranking and SEO so this is something I know all about and I'm definitely saying you can't do it for free and get anywhere and you definitely can't just rely on third party services for it all. You could put your trust in them and they can and will do whatever they like to your data.

For example YouTube reserve the right to delete or censor your videos for any number of copyright grey areas, e.g. did their system identify your games sound track as sounding just a little too much like some new top 40 song? Even if your video was published first? Well them you have no recourse and prepare to have your sound removed or your video hidden.

Has your free Web hosting taken a backup recently? Can you be absolutely sure? What happens if they crash or just close their doors tomorrow? At least if you pay you have some comeback and perhaps an SLA.

I rest my case.

Redhat has this:

https://www.openshift.com/

You are required to set-up your servers.

But it's got alot of options.

I'm using it to host my latest projects.

So far so good.

Before that I used:

https://byethost.com/index.php/free-hosting

Their service was pretty good, but it is less diverse. (I think they only support PHP [but that's all I needed at the time] )

I've used several others as well, but they gave me trouble as described above.

These two solutions have been great.

Redhat has this:
https://www.openshift.com/

I've also used openshift and I've been pleased with its flexibility.

Also for simple web pages Github pages is good and very easy to set up, but not as versatile.

No one has recommended this. Why not try Heroku?

Azure websites are pretty reasonable. I think I pay something like $10 a month for the lowest tier that allows registering a custom domain name. If you don't mind having a subdomain.azurewebsites.net url, you can use the free tier also. There might be some data limits that you could hit if you are hosting files, but for static content it's very reasonable. Plus you do have the ability to host full web apps, with everything ASP.NET offers (and apparently Python or PHP if you want), as well as all of the other Azure services if needed.

I think my GoDaddy domain costs me $9/year.

Altogether, it's like two tanks of gas a year.

Not meaning to sound harsh, but what do you mean by having "absolutely no budget"? Surely you can spare like $20 a year if you take your work and effort seriously? You can use a single site for multiple projects. Not having a method of payment (like a credit card or paypal account) is a different real issue in many countries (mine included).

This site is for my first indie game and I'm a bit apprehensive about spending money on something I'm nots sure of. I would definitely switch to a paid service once it gets more finished and I'm more certain I'll be able to sell.

I'm a bit apprehensive about spending money on something I'm nots sure of

Getting some effective hosting isn't spending money on your indie game. You're basically investing in your future as a developer. Your website is your launch pad for promoting all your future games and yourself. You only need one Web host even if you have 50 projects.