Solopreneurs hardly ever have the know-how regarding website development. If you’re starting up a new business, you definitely need to have a website. In this era of technology, e-commerce is the way to go. No business can hope to survive In this world if it doesn’t have an online presence.
But if you don’t have the funds to pay for a website, what do you do? Well, some web hosting platforms offer free versions of web hosting that let you create a basic website for free! While they may not incorporate the best and complete features that a host has to offer, they are super useful for emerging entrepreneurs who have zero cash balance and need a start. Below are the five best free web hosting for Solopreneurs.
1. InfinityFree
InfinityFree is a web hosting platform that gives you a domain completely free of cost. We don’t just mean that it’s free in the beginning. In fact, InfinityFree will give you the fastest web hosting services completely free of cost for as long as you like! And you’ll never have to worry about those annoying advertisements. It’s the perfect site for free web hosting for your small business.
Features
On the service’s website, there are some outstanding features. For example, there is infinite storage space and Bandwidth. There are 400 MySQL databases. Infinity free offers Integration with Cloudflare for improved speed. Softaculous automates the installation of WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla, and 400+ other common web applications, and a cPanel-like console makes it easy to manage the site.
The PrestaShop feature is of particular importance here as it is an open-source e-commerce platform that allows you to manage the solopreneur business. They help you build your own store with added features.
WordPress will provide you with lots of templates that you can use for building your website. You can design your small business effectively using this feature. Other Apps are also available (more than 400) that can help boost your online small business.
Uptime
You can lose a lot of customers if your website is down, even for the shortest time. Luckily, with InfinityFree, you get a 99.9% uptime! So you have near negligible downtimes.
Unlimited Bandwidth and disk space
InfinityFree’s free package will provide you with unlimited bandwidth and disk space which is a very shocking thing to have on a free website! So upload all the products that you want. This feature will do you good if your business has a content-heavy site.
Ease Of Use
InfinityFree is very easy to use in terms of uploading your products and managing files. The web control panel for Infinity Free shows all of the accounts you’ve made, together with their domain names, profile, and FTP login information.
The FTP-based Monsta file manager is accessible with a single click, which is useful for uploading a website you’ve built separately. Monsta, on InfinityFree, is similar to many other hosting file managers in terms of features. Using Monsta on InfinityFree is fairly easy.
Uploading products here is easy too. Simply select your website files and directories in Windows Explorer, for example, and drag and drop them into your webspace. While the cPanel doesn’t have all the features that other hosting platforms would give you, it’s more than enough for a hosting that is completely free.
WordPress and Softaculous
This web hosting allows you to easily install WordPress, a very useful content management system to help you optimize search engines and make your online store rank higher.
Perhaps most importantly, Softaculous helps you easily automate WordPress installation and several other common web applications. There’s no need to stress about low-level database information or other hassles; simply fill out a simple form, and your site will be up and running in under a minute.
No Advertisements
The best part about InfinityFree is that it does not display all those annoying advertisements on your website even though it’s free. So your website will be neat and tidy.
Drawbacks
InfinityFree does have its drawbacks. For example, there is no proper SSL certificate to protect your customer’s information. Also, there is close to no customer support. But it’s free web hosting, so you can’t really expect a lot.
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2. FreeHostia
FreeHostia is our next choice as the best free web hosting for solopreneurs. This is mainly because of its uptime that is reaching the sky. Apart from that, it offers you web hosting services without advertisements and completely free of cost.
Uptime
With FreeHostia, you get a whopping 99.9% uptime! As a solopreneur, this is a remarkable thing as your site will be up and running at all times, and your customers will be able to shop any time they like! So the 99.9% uptime guarantees reliability and sales for your small business. Don’t worry about the site not being active.
No Advertisements
Free hosts usually flood your websites with tons of advertisements and make your website look very unprofessional. Unnecessary Advertisements scare away customers because every click on these advertisements by mistake makes them leave the shopping site. But you don’t need to worry about your customers getting annoyed by advertisements when you’re using FreeHostia!
FreeHostia is completely ad-free! Even though you’re paying nothing, you still don’t get any of those annoying ads. Your customers can shop in peace.
Customer Support
Free Webhosting sites usually don’t have customer support. But FreeHostia provides you with customer support as well! If there’s any problem with your website, then your business can be severely affected. Any problem with the site might affect the customer’s experience with the site as well. Luckily, you can contact FreeHostia at any time to resolve the issues for you.
Storage
Storage on FreeHostia’s free plan is quite low at 250 MB only. You do get 6GB bandwidth, though. So if you’re looking for a website with unlimited storage and Bandwidth, check out the other options on the list.
Emails:
FreeHostia lets you have up to 3 email accounts associated with the website.
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3. Weebly
Weebly is a popular website builder that is used to power over 50 million websites worldwide. Users love it because Weebly is convenient to use and focuses on helping businesses thrive online.
The free package is ideal for experimenting with Weebly and understanding how to use its editor.
Completely Free
You can use Weebly for as long as you want with no expenses. Unlike other free web hosting platforms, Weebly gives full disclosure and does not have hidden expenses.
Marketing Tools And Selling
You get 500MB of storage, SEO, and social feeds marketing tools and analytics tools to monitor your site’s success. You can also sell on your websites without subscribing to a paid version.
Weebly offers a wide array of e-commerce marketing tools and features to help you manage and grow your online small business. However, they are not as well defined on the free plans.
If you want the full SEO features and marketing tools to grow your business, we recommend switching to the paid version. But you don’t necessarily have to pay if you want to use your website to sell products. You can continue on the free version.
Advertisements and No Custom Domain Name
Possibly the biggest drawback of Weebly’s free package is that your site will have advertisements on it. The site won’t be very presentable, but it will still be useful. Also, Weebly’s free plan doesn’t let you have your own customized domain name. Your domain name will be followed by “.Weebly.” This will let everyone know that you’re using Weebly’s free plan.
So if you want a presentable and customized website for your small business, you can opt for a paid plan. However, for solopreneurs with little or no resources allocated for their website, Weebly’s free plan is perfect!
SEO
About a third of online shoppers use Google and other search engines to discover stuff to purchase. This makes search engines very useful for boosting sales. With built-in features for eCommerce Search Engine Optimization, Weebly makes it very easy to achieve higher rankings.
Begin by customizing an eCommerce theme, then updating your local business listing and creating rich excerpts for your best-selling items. Create titles and page explanations that are descriptive and keyword-driven, and change the URLs to fit.
However, you need to note that you may not get most of the features for free.
Ease Of Use
If you want a simple, attractive interface and more creative guidance, Weebly is the way to go. The templates are all extremely well-organized.
Weebly is a hosting service that uses a drag-and-drop layout to make it simple to create a website. Rather than using complex techniques, you can easily move individual images, text boxes, icons, and other elements around the web.
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4. Byet Host
ByetHost is yet another valuable addition to our list of the best free web hosting for solopreneurs. While the features are not those that you’d expect on other web hosting platforms, remember that this is free hosting, and this is the best it can get for you. ByetHost is perfect for those with little or no budget for Web Hosting.
ByteHost advertises free data transfer, MySQL databases, add-ons, and parked domains. There’s 5GB of web space, the excellent Softaculous framework installs WordPress and hundreds of other common web apps for you automatically, and there’s a free website builder if you need it. All this for free and without advertisements.
Features
Byethost gives you access to important hosting technologies and tools you might need for your small business. Namely:
- PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0 php MyAdmin.
- DNS management for CNAME, SFP, and MX records.
- FTP access.
- Email accounts.
- Custom forwarders.
- Webmail.
- Redirects.
- Cron jobs.
- Custom error pages, and more.
No Advertisements
The Good news is that ByetHost does not display any advertisements on your websites. So you won’t have those annoying ads all over your website, and it will be much more presentable. You can even connect your own domain with ByetHost.
Disk Space:
ByetHost Free will provide you with 5 GB of disk space completely free of cost. The amount of Bandwidth has not been specified, though.
cPanel
A cPanel is present on the website builder that contains tools and features to help you build your website easily.
Free business mail
ByetHost gives you a free business email with your free web hosting, which can prove to be a useful feature.
Customer Support
ByetHost also offers customer support to its users even on its free plan! But this is through a ticketing system.
Drawbacks
Of course, like all free hosting, ByetHost also has its drawbacks. For example, the uptime is not very impressive, and there is no SSL certificate. So if you’re looking for reliable and safe web hosting, we recommend switching to paid plans.
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5. AwardSpace
Last on the list is AwardSpace. Awardspace lets you create a free website where you can connect your own domain. While AwardSpace isn’t perfect, it’s still free web hosting, so you will need to make do.
Bandwidth And Storage
With Awardspace, you get 5GB of Bandwidth a month and 1 GB storage. This is fairly good given that it’s free web hosting.
Email Included
You get one email that even comes with a spam filter!
Reseller Services
AwardSpace offers reseller services that deem it very beneficial for businesses.
No Advertisements
AwardSpace will not display advertisements on your website. This is great because too many ads can be extremely frustrating.
So if you’re planning to build a simple website with not many features to show, then AwardSpace will help you create a basic one.
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Conclusion
While we don’t recommend free web hosting for professional websites, free plans can still be useful if you’re super low on budget and just need a start. The above 5 are the best free web hosting for solopreneurs . You can use them for a start and slowly expand your e-commerce business accordingly.