Last updated on April 19th, 2021 at 08:28 am
In this article, you will learn about free web hosting in South Africa.
Owning a website in the current day is one of the most strategic ways to share your content. For newbies, you can start by using the free web hosting package that is widely available. This will help you get familiar with web hosting as you learn how to set up everything.
Free web hosting is not only favourable for newbies in the web hosting world but also to anyone who wants to operate a small website not necessarily for profits. As much as this kind of hosting is lucrative to many users, it has its own limits. If you want to operate a bigger website, you may want to subscribe to paid plan to achieve the desired functionality.
Table of Contents
Why you need Free Web Hosting in South Africa
Cost effectiveness
This is the key advantage which is different among various hosting providers. Your free web hosting comes with the following package:
- Free space on the server
- Free subdomain name as your address on the world wide web
- Provides an easy learning curve.
Newbies can create a website from scratch and learn all the basic technicalities of creating a website without any pressure. This way, they will be more comfortable in the future when transiting to a paid plan since they know that they can optimise their site to give the results they want to achieve.
Can act as a resource base for small groups.
A free website provides the platform for small groups to share information therein as well as contact one another at no cost at all. This is beneficial as it allows the group to be productive in their work.
Disadvantages of free web hosting
Ads
You may have been wondering how hosting service providers make profit to run their business by offering free web hosting services. This here is usually the catch. They usually display marketing advertisements on the free websites they host to earn their profit.
Ads may alter the outlook of your brand since any kind of ad can appear on your website. It is advisable that commercial websites subscribe to the paid plans to uphold the integrity of their brand. Similarly, individual websites can also consider the paid plans to maintain a good traffic on their site. Users tend to dismiss websites that contain a lot of ads.
Limited bandwidth and speed
Anybody starting a website has the hope that as many people as possible can visit your site. However, this may not be achievable because the bandwidth on free hosting is limited. Only a given number is allowed on your website per month. Once this number is exceeded the website hosting is stopped by the servers. This means that you have to subscribe to a paid plan to get an extended bandwidth.
The same applies to the data transfer rate on your website. Free websites tend to be quite slow in loading. To improve this, a paid subscription will increase your data transfer rate hence a faster loading site.
Inadequate customer support
Most hosting providers prioritise on the clients who are using the paid subscriptions. This means that when you are using the free web hosting package you can only make use of the resource base on their website or you need to wait for as long as possible to get a direct response. This can be quite frustrating when you are in the middle of installation or any other process that requires immediate attention.
No main domain
Free web hosting plans do not provide an individualised domain name. Most times, they will give you a subdomain from their domain. This can look like mywebsite.wordpress.com. Therefore, to own your own domain name you must subscribe to the paid plan.
The disadvantages of free websites outweigh the advantages by a good margin as we have observed above. However, we cannot rule out that free websites are not beneficial. You just need to utilise them for the right purpose.
We have sought out some of the best free web hosting service providers that will give you value for your time and resources. These ones have a silver lining that they are worth your consideration.
Top 7 Free Web Hosting Service Providers
#1. WordPress.com
This is one of the most popular free hosting providers. Most of the people who use this are bloggers. It is important to highlight that this is different from the popular WordPress.org which is the famous Content Management System.
WordPress.com gives you:
- a free subdomain
- access to free templates for your website
- 3GB storage
As many other free websites, the free plan displays ads on your website.
#2. Wix
Wix is one of the most popular fully hosted website builders that offer Free Web Hosting in South Africa. This builder is common for newbies and as it provides one of the easiest-to-use editor and its free hosting plan has adequate resources to utilise. One only needs to change to the paid plan when you need to scale your site or use more specific features that are not offered on the free plan.
Here is what you can expect from the free Wix web hosting:
- 500MB disk space
- Free template
- Online store – due to the integrity of personal data it is more advisable to use the paid plan for better security.
- 500MB bandwidth
- Wix apps
- Proprietary database
Wix usually display their ads on free sites. To get a more formal looking site, you can transit into any of their paid plans.
#3. Truehost
Truehost stand out from other service providers since it uses cloud hosting. This means that all the sites they host are usually fast loading, including the free website, which is quite outstanding from the other hosts. You can also be assured of stable servers that will keep your site up and running on the world wide web 24/7/365. Here is what you can expect from Truehost:
- 24/7 Customer service via email, phone, and live chat
- Unlimited Disk space
- High uptime and reliability
- WHM control panel
- Free subdomain
- Daily backup services
#4. Weebly
Weebly is one of the website builders that is doing exclusively well in the market today. Their free plan includes the following:
- Proprietary control panel
- 500MB disk space
- A free Weebly subdomain
- Proprietary database
- Free SSL security
A key thing to note when using Weebly is that it is powerful on its own, but it is not flexible enough to change to another host.
#5. 000WebHost
This is the free web hosting service from Hostinger. It comes with the Zyro website builder which makes the designing stage a seamless process. The most incredible part about this builder is that visitors will not see ads on your websites but there will be some on your dashboard.
Below is some of the features that you can expect from 000WebHost.
- One MySQL database
- 300MB disk space
- Community forum but no live support
- No subdomains
- One website
One unique factor about this hosting provider is that you will not require a credit card when setting up your site and you can use their free service for as long as you want.
#6. AwardSpace
Looking for a generous free website plan? You just landed the right place. AwardSpace is one of the rare free web hosting service providers that does not display ads on the free websites. The most interesting part is that you can place ads on your free site to monetize it. Here are more features that you can expect:
- 5GB bandwidth- AwardSpace enables you to monitor your bandwidth usage so that you can budget your resources.
- 1GB disk space
- MySQL database
- 24/7 live chat – this is also a unique feature among most free website users.
- One website
- Three subdomains
- One-click Content Management System (CMS)
#7. Freehostia
Freehostia aims at providing reliable free hosting. This means that your website will have less downtime. They provide a website builder that is complete with templates and they offer support to all their clients within an hour to help solve all your issues. Here are more features from Freehostia free web hosting:
- 250MB disk space
- 6 GB bandwidth
- Five websites
- One MySQL database
- No subdomains
- Ticket support system and FAQ
In Conclusion
Free web hosting is one of the most ingenious services provided in the web hosting world. As a user, you can utilise this service from any of the service providers listed above and run a website at no cost.
You just need to ensure that your website remains relevant with the free plan and you can always prepare to scale it to an affordable paying plan.