000webhost (Hostinger) Alternatives

The email that finally killed off 000webhost arrived in mid-2024, but for a lot of people I heard from, the shock wasn't the shutdown — it was realising how much of their online life was sitting on a free account they'd stopped thinking about a decade earlier. One reader had a client's brochure site on 000webhost since 2013. No backups. The domain was still pointed there. When Hostinger announced the closure after seventeen years of the free tier, that little site became an emergency rather than a footnote.

If you're reading this page in a hurry, here's the short version: 000webhost is gone. Hostinger announced the closure in July 2024 and the remaining sites were switched off by the end of the year — Netcraft's web server survey recorded the drop as hundreds of thousands of hostnames vanished at once. The 000webhost review page here on HostingSpotter is kept up as a historical record of what the free plan included, for anyone auditing old invoices or account records. There is no free tier to return to. What this page is for is helping you decide where a 000webhost-shaped site should live next, whether that's a free hobby plan, a cheap shared account, or something a little more serious.

When it makes sense to leave 000webhost

Since the service no longer exists, "leaving" is mostly a question of where you land and how quickly. But it's worth being honest about what you were actually getting, because it shapes which replacement makes sense.

The free plan always had hard edges. A few hundred megabytes of disk, a bandwidth cap that a single Reddit thread could blow through, no email accounts on the domain, and a platform that was happy to suspend accounts it deemed inactive. It was fine for a university project or a placeholder page. It was never a home for anything you'd be embarrassed to lose — and in 2015, the service suffered a breach that exposed millions of user records, which was a useful reminder that "free" and "carefully maintained" don't always travel together.

The practical reasons people were already moving on before the shutdown:

• Renewal and cost creep around the ecosystem. 000webhost was Hostinger's funnel into paid hosting. Once you needed a second site, email, or daily backups, you were being nudged toward a paid Hostinger plan with an intro price and a much higher renewal rate. That's normal in this industry, but it means the "free" story usually had a paid ending anyway.
• Resource limits. CPU and memory throttling on free tiers is real. A WordPress site with a few plugins could feel slow at any traffic level.
• No email on your domain. A contact address at your own domain is table stakes for a small business, and free hosting never included it.
• Support decline. Free-tier support was community forums and documentation at the best of times. As the wind-down approached, there was nothing meaningful to escalate to.
• Missing features. No automated backups worth trusting, no staging, limited cron jobs, and restrictions on what you could run.

If your site is already offline, the priority order is: recover the files if you still can, repoint DNS so visitors see something rather than an error, then pick a host that fits what the site is becoming rather than what it was.

When you should stay

You can't stay on 000webhost — but there are two honest versions of "don't rush."

First, if you already took Hostinger's migration offer and the site is running fine there, leave it alone. Moving hosting to satisfy an abstract preference is how people break working sites. Check the renewal price on your current plan, diarise it, and revisit in a month when nothing is on fire.

Second, check whether you actually lost anything. A remarkable number of 000webhost sites were one-page placeholders built in an afternoon and untouched since. If the site's job was to exist rather than to do anything — no traffic, no enquiries, no content you can't recreate in an hour — then the cheapest correct answer is to rebuild it quickly on a host you like rather than to spend days on forensic recovery. I've watched people burn a week rescuing a page that took twenty minutes to build. Value your time against what's actually on the server.

Third, if the site genuinely is a throwaway — a class demo, a test install, a page with no traffic and no consequences — then moving to another free tier is perfectly rational and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The picks below include two hosts that still run free plans. The trade-off is the same one 000webhost taught everyone eventually: free hosting is a borrowed house. Keep a local copy of everything, and don't put your business's only copy of anything on it.

The alternatives

I've grouped these by what they're actually good at rather than by price alone, because the cheapest option and the right option are frequently not the same thing.

Hostinger — the obvious landing spot for most 000webhost refugees

Hostinger built 000webhost, so the migration path is genuinely smooth: the control panel, PHP versions, and hPanel conventions will feel familiar, and the importer handles WordPress cleanly in my experience. The Premium shared plan is the sensible target — multiple sites, free SSL, weekly backups, and email included. Pricing is term-dependent: at time of writing, long-term signup prices start at only a few dollars a month, but renewal is several times the intro rate, which is exactly the kind of pricing this site exists to keep visible. Who it's for: anyone running one to a handful of small sites who wants the lowest-friction move and is willing to lock in a long term to get the headline rate.

x10Hosting — if you want to keep a genuinely free plan

x10Hosting is one of the few free PHP/MySQL hosts still standing in 2026, and the draw is that the free plan advertises unmetered bandwidth and free email — the two things 000webhost never gave you. It runs on a modern stack with cPanel-style tooling on the paid side. Who it's for: students and hobbyists who want free hosting that behaves a little more like real hosting. The usual free-host caveats apply: read the suspension policy, and keep backups elsewhere.

AwardSpace — free hosting with a clean upgrade ladder

AwardSpace has been in the free hosting business for years and offers a free plan with roughly a gigabyte of disk alongside paid tiers you can step up to without re-platforming (at time of writing — check current limits before you build around them). It includes a free subdomain, so you can get something online before you've sorted a domain. Who it's for: beginners who want to start free and expect to upgrade in place rather than migrate twice.

WebHostingPad — the budget paid option, eyes open

WebHostingPad competes on price harder than almost anyone: at time of writing its long-term signup pricing sits at the very bottom of the shared hosting market. You get unmetered bandwidth and a free domain on qualifying plans. The honest caveat is that renewal pricing is meaningfully higher than the intro rate and the plan tiers are less generous than the mid-market hosts, so read the renewal line before you commit. Who it's for: someone with one simple site who wants paid hosting — SSL, email, a support channel — for the price of a coffee, and accepts the trade-offs.

IONOS WordPress Hosting — cheap, European, and corporate-backed

IONOS runs WordPress-specific plans that have historically opened around the one-to-two dollar mark per month for the first year at time of writing, with renewal higher. You get a managed WordPress install, a domain, and email inboxes included, backed by a large European operator with data centres you can choose between in Europe and the US. Who it's for: anyone who wants the reassurance of a big company behind a small site, or a European data residency without paying a premium.

Time4VPS — when you've outgrown shared anything

Time4VPS, a Lithuanian provider, sells unmanaged Linux VPS slices at prices that start at pocket change per month at time of writing. This is not a like-for-like replacement — there's no one-click WordPress babysitting, and you'll be patching your own server. But if your 000webhost-era project has turned into something real and you want root access, predictable resources, and EU data residency, this is the value end of the market. Who it's for: developers and tinkerers comfortable with SSH who want the cheapest honest VPS in Europe.

Tiiny.host — for static sites and one-pagers

A large share of 000webhost sites were a single HTML page. Tiiny.host is built for exactly that: zip your site, drop it in, get a URL. Paid plans start around the five-euro mark per month at time of writing, and it handles redirects, password protection, and forms. Who it's for: portfolios, event pages, documentation, and prototypes — anything that doesn't need PHP or a database.

How to switch without downtime

For most 000webhost users the site is already down, so "without downtime" means "before anyone notices it was ever gone." Either way, the sequence is the same.

1. Recover your files first. Check whether you still have a local copy, an old backup, or any export the platform offered during the wind-down. If the site is still reachable at all, mirror it immediately with a tool like wget --mirror — grab everything before you touch DNS.
2. Set your DNS TTLs low before you move anything. If your domain's A record has a TTL of 86400 seconds, drop it to 300 (five minutes) a day or two before the switch. That alone turns a scary migration into a boring one.
3. Build the site on the new host and test it there. Most hosts let you preview via a temporary URL or a hosts-file entry on your machine. Check links, forms, and SSL. For WordPress, import the database and search-replace the old domain for the new staging URL.
4. Move email deliberately. If you're adding domain email for the first time, set up the mailboxes before flipping DNS so that mail sent to you during the switch doesn't bounce. MX records and SPF/DKIM records should be staged alongside the A record.
5. Flip DNS in one sitting, with a rollback plan. Point the A record (and www) at the new host, leave the old content in place for a week if it still exists, and watch analytics or ping/dig to confirm the world is seeing the new server.
6. Reissue SSL after DNS settles. Let's Encrypt certificates are free and most hosts automate issuance — but it has to run after the DNS change propagates, not before.

For WordPress sites specifically, one extra step saves a lot of grief: change the site URL in the database to the temporary preview address before you test, then change it back to the real domain before DNS flips. WordPress hard-codes its address in two options rows, and a botched search-replace is the single most common way people break their own migration. Most hosts' migration plugins handle this correctly in my testing — but if you're doing it by hand, use a serialized-data-safe search-replace tool rather than a raw SQL update, or your widgets and menus will quietly fall apart.

It also pays to migrate at a quiet hour and to warn anyone who depends on the site. For a small business, that might mean a one-line note to the handful of people who email the site's contact form weekly. Downtime is rarely the real cost of a hosting move; confusion is.

How we evaluate hosting providers

Everything on HostingSpotter starts from the renewal price, not the intro price. I look at what you pay in year two and year three, because that is what a real hosting relationship costs — the headline rate is a marketing decision, the renewal rate is the business model. Beyond pricing, I weigh what the plan actually includes at renewal (backups, email, SSL, site limits), how the provider handles resource limits in practice, the quality and honesty of support, and where the data actually lives. When I haven't verified a number myself, I say "at time of writing" and point you at the source rather than guessing. Where a provider is coy about renewal pricing, I treat that as information in itself: a host that hides the year-two price is telling you how it expects the conversation to go. We don't run paid placements on these pages, and nobody buys their way onto a recommendation — including, for what it's worth, hosts that pay us elsewhere.