TechRadar Verdict

FreeHostingNoAds’ free plan won’t fill your site with adverts but will hinder its growth with 1GB of disk space and 5GB of monthly traffic limitations. If you have in mind anything but a small and simple site, its paid plans will look much more interesting.

Pros

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Ad-free
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24/7 support
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30-days money-back guarantee with paid plans
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Auto installer for WordPress, Joomla, and Grav
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Instant account activation
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Paid plans are pretty cheap

Cons

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No SSL certificate nor backups with the free plan
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The free plan is pretty limited in general
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Stripped-down website builder

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FreeHostingNoAds’ name may not be the most imaginative one but it definitely is descriptive. For over a decade now, the company has been offering just that, completely free hosting solutions that won’t crowd your site with unwanted ads.

As usually is the case with cost-free web hosting, the major concern with these solutions are restrictions on resources (available disk space and monthly bandwidth allowance) that are part of the package. Despite this, FreeHostingNoAds manages to even up things by including more than a few attractive features.

Want to try FreeHostingNoAds? Check out the website here

It seems that the company enjoyed staying secretive since it scarcely reveals anything about itself. It was founded in 2010 with an aim to provide “top-quality hosting for personal websites, forums, blogs, and small business websites for free” and that’s about it.

Its official site is easy to look at with its simple style that combines a standard layout with the white color and the shades of sapphire blue, adding a charming but inappropriately dressed cosmonaut with an idea (the official mascot, we hope) for good measure.

Although the site doesn’t feature a blog, FreeHostingNoAds is surprisingly present on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. However (and unsurprisingly), there hasn't been much activity over the past year.

Plans and pricing

With FreeHostingNoAds you get to choose between three shared hosting solutions, one of which is fully free, and ad-free to boot. This plan includes a single hosted domain, up to three subdomains, 1GB of storage space, 5GB of monthly traffic, a one-click installer, a template-based website builder, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Although restrictions on resources could be crippling for anything but a small and simple site, the plan looks a bit better when it comes to essentials, with support for PHP 5/7, phpMyAdmin, MySQL, Perl, CGI, GD, lots of email features, and 24/7/365 customer support.

If this doesn't fit your needs (and you can spare a few bucks), two additional paid plans are on sale and both include a 30-days money-back guarantee so you have plenty of time before making a final decision. The "VIP“ goes for a mere $0.50 ($4.99 upon renewal) and will free you from the restriction on disk space and bandwidth, and if you want even more unlimited features, go with "PRO“.

Methods of payment with FreeHostingNoAds include all major credit cards, PayPal, Worldpay, and BankWire.

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Yes	No	Header Cell - Column 2	Header Cell - Column 3
Free hosting	Windows hosting	Row 0 - Cell 2	Row 0 - Cell 3
Linux hosting	Green hosting	Row 1 - Cell 2	Row 1 - Cell 3
Small business hosting	Video hosting	Row 2 - Cell 2	Row 2 - Cell 3
Shared hosting	Colocation hosting	Row 3 - Cell 2	Row 3 - Cell 3
E-commerce hosting	Bare metal hosting	Row 4 - Cell 2	Row 4 - Cell 3
Email hosting	Reseller hosting	Row 5 - Cell 2	Row 5 - Cell 3
VPS hosting	Managed WordPress Hosting	Row 6 - Cell 2	Row 6 - Cell 3
Website builder	Dedicated hosting	Row 7 - Cell 2	Row 7 - Cell 3
WordPress hosting	Row 8 - Cell 1	Row 8 - Cell 2	Row 8 - Cell 3

Ease of use

To sign up for a plan (free or paid) you’ll be asked to create an account with FreeHostingNoAds, and to do so you’ll have to surrender quite a lot of personal information (and it's going to take a while).

However, ahead of that, you’ll (again) select a plan, deal with the domain name (register a new one, transfer an old one or make use of free subdomain feature) and decide whether to include an SSL certificate (five of them are currently available) and VPS (three plans are available).

Needless to say, both SSL certificates and VPS will cost you extra money. Price for an SSL is ranging from $25.95 to $ 599.00 per year, and for VPS from $215.88 to $719.88 per year. However, with VPS you can choose between three billing cycles including three months, six months, or one year period.

The next step requires you to fill out your account information, come up with a password, and go through the terms of service.

After verifying your email (which will also include the necessary login information), you should proceed to the custom-made control panel which may look a bit intimidating at first but it is pretty easy-to-use. What is more, tech-savvy users will be glad to see the wide array of features such as database manager, PHP settings, site building tools, backup manager, website statistics, and much more.

If you opted for a free subdomain at the start (free plan supports up to three), go to “Domain Manager” and create one with any of the ten available (and rather lengthy) names.

WordPress, Joomla, and Grav can be yours in no time thanks to Zacky App Installer, however, to access more web apps you’ll have to upgrade your plan to a paid one. Alternatively, you can take advantage of a simplistic template-based Zacky Website Builder, which is very user-friendly but somewhat limited (you can create a site with up to five pages).

Performance — We used GTmetrix to measure the uptime and response time of FreeHostingNoAds' main site (Image credit: GTmetrix)

Speed and experience

Although FreeHostingNoAds won’t empower your site with cutting-edge speed, it won’t sabotage it either by making it load at a snail's pace. After performing several speed tests on the main site (via GTmetrix), we were pleasantly surprised with an A (97%) as a conclusive grade. The site completely loaded in 7.7 seconds, which is somewhere between the average result and the recommended one. However, after checking out all other vital web metrics (largest contentful paint, total blocking time, and cumulative layout shift) we understood why the score was at the very top.

All of FreeHostingNoAds’ plans come with an industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is good to see. After monitoring the uptime of the main site (via UptimeRobot) for two weeks we failed to find any trace of downtime which led to flawless 100% of it. In addition to this, the average response time was more than reasonable at 214 milliseconds and with only a single major spike, which is quite insignificant.

Support

FreeHostingNoAds comes off a bit stronger than most of its free hosting competitors when it comes to customer support. Their support staff is on duty 24/7 and available via integrated ticketing system, sales live chat, and email. In addition to this, you can contact the sales staff via telephone through three numbers, one of each for users from the UK, the USA, and Germany.

Alternatively, you can search for solutions on your own by using the knowledgebase. Its layout is more comparable with a FAQ section as it takes the reader through the common questions and concerns offering short but suitable text-only solutions. Although these answers are not as detailed as we would like them to be, they manage to cover most of the issues users are likely to encounter during their trip through web hosting.

The competition

If you’re keen on finding a free web host, but not too keen on having heavy restrictions on storage space and bandwidth, feel free to check out Infinity Free instead of FreeHostingNoAds. With them, you’ll get unlimited storage/bandwidth, a one-click installer, and a simplified but fully functional version of cPanel, all of which is something you would otherwise get withn a commercial package.

Free Web Hosting Area is another alternative to FreeHostingNoAds, and both hosts offer fully free shared hosting packages that pack freedom from unwanted adverts to boot. However, this won’t be true forever with Free Web Hosting Area since they promise an ad-free regime for new sites only. As soon as your site starts to grow you’ll be forced to decide whether to pay $1 per month for your site to remain ad-free or to learn how to tolerate ads popping up all over your pages.

However, if you can spare a few dollars each month, there are plenty of budget-friendly hosts for which you can be sure that they will never place an ad on your website. One of these is US-based Bluehost, a novice-friendly host which offers a wide variety of feature-packed plans at attractive prices, especially for those who are willing to commit for a year or longer.

Bluehost is one of the best options for those who intend to create a WordPress site since it is one of the three hosts that are endorsed by WordPress itself. If that is not a must, HostGator is as capable as Bluehost and with its generous 45-day money-back guarantee you’ll have plenty of time to test its services before making up your mind.

Final verdict

In addition to cost-free (and ad-free) hosting, with FreeHostingNoAds you’ll get plenty of features with just as many limitations (such as 5GB bandwidth, no backups nor an SSL certificate), which makes it a bit hard to recommend it in comparison with free hosts like Infinity Free. However, paired with good performance, round-the-clock support, and a 30-day money-back guarantee their paid packages seem worth a try.

If you would rather put youth trust (and your site) in hands of a better-known web hosting provider, check out what HostGator and Bluehost can offer.

Mike is a lead security reviewer at Future, where he stress-tests VPNs, antivirus and more to find out which services are sure to keep you safe, and which are best avoided. Mike began his career as a lead software developer in the engineering world, where his creations were used by big-name companies from Rolls Royce to British Nuclear Fuels and British Aerospace. The early PC viruses caught Mike's attention, and he developed an interest in analyzing malware, and learning the low-level technical details of how Windows and network security work under the hood.

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