13 Craigleith
7 Kersfield Road
London, GB SW15 3HN
GB
Freehostia.com is a U.K. based hosting company that’s been around since 2005. Freehostia offers free Linux-based web hosting, paid shared hosting, virtual private servers, semi dedicated servers, dedicated servers and domain names.
Review
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Sales
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I was interested in hosting a small Wordpress blog on Freehosita’s impressive free hosting plan. Sales questions can be asked by online form or by Freehosita’s user forums. Because I was in no hurry, I posted my question on the user forum and checked back the following day. My question had somehow been deleted. I tried again, only to find the same thing happen. I eventually moved to Freehostia’s online form and did get an answer to my question within about four hours. Though the answers weren’t complete, nor were all my questions answered, the staff seemed polite and well-versed in what Freehostia could do for me. Could be better.
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Setup
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New clients need only fill out an online form to sign up for a new hosting account. Free hosting accounts really are free, though you must pay for a new domain name or the cost to transfer your domain over to Freehostia ($9.95/year). I received a verification phone call within a few hours of paying for my account and my new web hosting space was ready to use about six hours later.
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Billing
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Freehostia takes all major credit cards. My hosting account was free, so I didn’t really have to deal with the billing department to any measurable degree. I did fire off one question about whether my domain would be automatically renewed at the end of the year and received an almost instant answer from Freehostia billing.
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Pricing
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Freehostia offers a free hosting plan, Chocolate, which includes 250 megabytes of space and 6 gigabytes of bandwidth at no charge. The account itself is free, even though users must pay $9.95/year to register a domain name. Excellent features for a free account!
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Reliability
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I had serious speed issues from my very first day with Freehostia. I filed a trouble ticket, asking when the issues may be resolved, but never heard back. My hosting server suffered no hardware issues, but was haltingly slow many times a day and suffered unplanned outages at least once a week.
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Help & Support
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I had to contact support right off the bat after learning, despite what I’d been told by the sales team, that I really could not host a Wordpress blog on my free account. Support was quick to respond, immediately sending me to an area of their website where I could upgrade to a paid account. I chose not to do so, but remained with Freehostia for one year. Support is quick, but not always helpful. Many times questions aren’t answered thoroughly or even at all. Asking a question by forum is really just a way for the support team to tell you to file a trouble ticket, so I found the forum completely useless as a customer. Needs some improvement!
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Uptime
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My uptime monitor showed that Freehostia maintained a 98.67% uptime rating over a one year period.
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Guarantee
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for Freehostia are found online. Highlights include:
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Bandwidth overages are charged at $12 per gigabyte and must be prepaid.
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File uploads restricted to 500 kilobytes per file.
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SMTP mail services not available on free accounts.
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MySQL databases may not exclude 10 megabytes.
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Support for outgoing services (RSS feeds, Wordpress, stats) is disabled.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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It’s free!
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Hepsia hosting control panel easy to learn and use.
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No intrusive banner ads.
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Staff is friendly.
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Perfect for simple webpage, resume’ hosting or family website.
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Disadvantages
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No live chat or telephone support.
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Support not always thorough or accurate with answers.
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Speeds very slow at times.
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Many unplanned outages that were never addressed.
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Lots of limitations on FTP, email and MySQL.
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Not compatible with Wordpress, Joomla or osCommerce despite claims to the contrary.
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Website ridiculously hard to navigate.
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