Hostinger Free (000webhost) Alternatives

October 14, 2024 was the last day 000webhost existed. After seventeen years as the internet's most famous free web host — the place where a generation of students, hobbyists, and "I just want to try PHP" tinkerers put their first site — Hostinger pulled the plug and pointed everyone at its paid plans. I remember the thread on r/webdev comparing it to Geocities shutting down, and honestly the comparison was fair. If you are reading this, you are probably one of three people: someone whose site disappeared with the shutdown, someone who took the migration offer and is now eyeing a renewal, or someone who simply wants free-or-nearly-free hosting and needs to know what still exists.

That last group is the one I want to help most, because the free hosting landscape has quietly split in two. There are a few genuine survivors with real free tiers, and there are ultra-budget paid hosts cheap enough to make the question almost moot. This piece covers when it makes sense to leave Hostinger Free (000webhost) — including the obvious sense that the choice was made for you — when a free plan is still the right call, and the alternatives I would actually use. Prices are at time of writing.

When it makes sense to leave Hostinger Free (000webhost)

The service already left you

Let me deal with the elephant first. 000webhost shut down in October 2024, and Hostinger, its parent company, offered account holders a path onto Hostinger's paid hosting. So "leaving" here is partly literal: if you did not export your files before the deadline, that data is gone, and no article can help you get it back. If you did export and you are now sitting on a Hostinger paid plan you accepted in a hurry, the question becomes whether that plan is the right home — and you are free to compare it against everything below. Nobody should stay on a plan they accepted as an emergency landing.

Free hosting has structural costs you felt

Even before the shutdown, 000webhost carried the familiar free-hosting baggage: tight storage and bandwidth caps, no email, forced sleep or ads on some free tiers, PHP and MySQL versions frozen behind the paid upgrade, no meaningful support, and — the part that ended badly for some people — the standing possibility that the service would simply end. Free hosting is free because you are not the customer. When a free host's business model is converting you to paid, the free tier is a demo, and demos expire. If any of those constraints were hurting your project, the shutdown was a nudge to build on ground that has rent, a contract, and someone accountable when it breaks.

The migrated plan renews like any other

If you moved to Hostinger on one of their promotional offers, you have joined the standard pricing model: deep discount for a long commitment, higher price at renewal. Hostinger Premium, for example, has been advertised around $2.99 a month on a 48-month term (roughly $143 up front) with renewal near $10.99 a month at time of writing. That is normal market practice and not a scam — but if you signed up reflexively during the migration, check what your renewal will actually be and compare it against the alternatives below. Paying $140 up front to avoid thinking about hosting for four years is a legitimate choice; making it by accident is not.

No email, no backups, no recourse

It is worth spelling out what free tiers almost never include, because 000webhost users hit these walls constantly. Email on your own domain is usually absent or crippled. Automated backups are rare, which means a single bad deploy or an expired account can end the project. Support is a forum at best. When something breaks at 11pm before a deadline, the difference between free hosting and a three-dollar plan is that somebody answers. If you have ever lost an afternoon to a problem you were not allowed to ask anyone about, that is the strongest argument for paying a small amount.

Your project outgrew "free" entirely

The honest one. If the site is now a business — real traffic, real customers, real revenue — free or $1-a-month hosting was the wrong foundation the moment money started depending on it. What you need is predictable uptime, backups, support that answers, and enough resources that a traffic spike is good news. Budget shared hosting covers this for a few dollars a month; a VPS covers it better. The gap between "free" and "adequate for a business" is smaller than it has ever been.

When you should stay

Free hosting is still the right answer for some people, and I have defended it in print before.

Stay free if this is genuinely a learning project. You are studying PHP, you want a real database and a real control panel, and nothing is at stake. Free hosting with ads and sleep timers is a perfectly good classroom. Paying money to learn how to upload files is unnecessary.

Stay free if the site is a portfolio stub, a class assignment, a wedding page, or anything disposable that needs to exist at a URL for a few months. A free static host or a free tier with a subdomain is exactly the right tool.

Stay with a small paid plan if the site is yours and it matters even slightly. The jump from "free" to "two or three dollars a month" buys you a custom domain, real email, backups, and a support channel. For a personal blog with any ambition, that is the sweet spot.

And if you accepted Hostinger's migration offer and your site runs fine on it, staying is a completely reasonable outcome. The plan is competent, the platform is modern, and re-upholstering a working site for sport is a hobby, not advice.

The alternatives

From the pool we track, these are the options I would actually put in front of someone leaving 000webhost. Prices at time of writing.

x10Hosting — the free survivor with a real control panel

x10Hosting has been running free hosting since 2004 — it predates 000webhost's decline and outlived it. The free plan gives you PHP, MySQL, email, and a real control panel with no trial clock and no credit card. There is a paid upgrade path for when you outgrow it. Two honest warnings from my own digging: the free tier has resource expectations of a hobby project, and there is an inactivity policy — accounts can be deactivated after roughly 45 days without a login, which has caught people out (their community forum is full of those threads). Log in monthly, keep your own backups, and it is a genuinely useful free home.

Tiiny.host — for static sites, in about a minute

Tiiny.host is the fastest way I know to put files on the internet: upload a zip with an index.html and you have a live site. There is a free plan for one small site at time of writing, and paid tiers run from about $5 a month (Tiny) up to $13 (Solo) and $31 (Pro), with annual billing cheaper. This is static hosting — no PHP, no database — so it is perfect for project pages, documentation, prototypes, and shared artifacts, and wrong for anything dynamic. The friction is close to zero, which is the whole product.

AwardSpace — free tier with a path to paid

AwardSpace keeps a free plan with a small allocation, a subdomain, and a limited number of support tickets per month (four, last I checked), with paid tiers for when you need more. Reviewers are split on it — the free experience is what you would expect at the price, and I would not put anything load-bearing on it — but as a second free option alongside x10Hosting it keeps you from being a single free host's shutdown notice away from zero again. Their paid tiers are cheap and scale sensibly.

Hostinger — the paid successor, done with open eyes

Hostinger is where 000webhost's parent company wants you, and the destination is decent: modern stack, a friendly custom control panel (hPanel), good performance for the money, and intro pricing that undercuts most of the market — around $2.99 a month for Premium on a 48-month term at time of writing, renewing near $10.99. My advice is simply to buy with the renewal in mind: choose the term length deliberately, take the 30-day money-back window to test properly, and do not buy the add-on stack at checkout (backups and email are the usual upsells). As paid hosts go, it is a fair deal on honest terms if you read them.

Krystal Shared Starter — cheap entry to a genuinely good host

Krystal Shared Starter is the entry point to Krystal, the UK independent I recommend often for its honest pricing and real support. The Starter tier is aimed exactly at this use case — a first proper website on infrastructure that will not disappear — and it sits a tier below Krystal's £7-a-month Amethyst plan at time of writing. You get UK-based green-powered hosting, a human support team, and a natural upgrade path through the Krystal range as the site grows. For a UK or European audience this is my "first paid hosting" recommendation.

Time4VPS — when free shared hosting was always the wrong shape

Time4VPS is here for a specific person: the tinkerer who was using 000webhost as a sandbox and would really rather have a server. Their Linux VPS plans start around €2 to €3 a month for a small slice at time of writing (they run promotions heavily, and their larger plans show the usual pattern — one plan I checked listed €10 a month promotional against €19.99 at renewal, so read the renewal price). It is unmanaged, so you install and secure everything yourself — but for learning Linux, running bots, or hosting experiments with real root access, a cheap VPS beats free shared hosting on every axis except "who patches it."

For most people reading this, my short version is: students and hobbyists on x10Hosting or Tiiny.host, anyone with a real site on Krystal Shared Starter or Hostinger, and tinkerers who want root on Time4VPS. The free tier is for learning; the moment a stranger depends on the site, buy the two-dollar plan.

The wider pool also holds WebHostingPad (cheap long-term shared plans with a free domain, though I could not verify their renewal pricing to a standard I would publish), SmarterASP.NET (budget Windows/.NET hosting if your project is ASP.NET), and IONOS, whose WordPress plans advertise first-year prices around $1 before renewing much higher — the intro-to-renewal gap there is one of the steepest I have seen, so go in with the year-two number in hand.

How to switch without downtime

If your 000webhost site is already gone, skip to the "set up fresh" notes at the end of this section. If you are moving from the Hostinger landing spot or another host, this is the sequence.

Take stock of what exists: files, databases, mailboxes, DNS records, and — critically — where your domain actually points. Many 000webhost users ran on free subdomains; if you have a real domain, you have options, and if you do not, register one first. It is the single most valuable dollar-a-month in this whole category.

Back up everything you can still reach: a full file copy via FTP or the file manager, plus a database export from phpMyAdmin or the panel's backup tool. Download both copies locally. With small free hosts I also keep a zipped copy in cloud storage, because the next shutdown notice could be yours.

Provision the new host and test before switching DNS. Upload the site, import the database, update connection strings and config files, and test with a hosts-file entry so you can see the site on the new server before the world does. Watch PHP version differences — old code written for PHP 5 or 7 may throw deprecation errors on a current stack.

Then lower DNS TTLs, update the A record or nameservers, and keep the old account alive until the new site is confirmed live everywhere. With static sites on a host like Tiiny.host there is no database to worry about and the whole thing is a zip upload plus a DNS point.

If you are starting fresh rather than migrating: pick the domain first, choose a host whose renewal price you have actually read, and build on a stack (WordPress, or a static site) that any of these hosts can carry, so that moving again later is cheap. Portability is the only real insurance in this business.

How we evaluate hosting providers

HostingSpotter exists because hosting pricing is designed to be confusing, and free hosting is where that confusion starts. We evaluate providers on what the service costs across years one through three — including renewal rates, add-on pressure, and what happens to your site if the company's strategy changes. We weigh resource honesty (what "unmetered" actually permits), support reachability, and how easily you can get your data out. Where a number is promotional or unverifiable, I say "at time of writing" or omit it rather than dress up a guess. The alternatives above come from the providers we track in our database, and nobody pays to be here.