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(Please see our IMPORTANT update here for explanations as to why you should be extremely careful with this website. Our recommendation is to avoid at all costs. Serious allegations appearing on the web which should not be ignored).

WARNING – DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE – GOOGLE THEIR NAME + “SCAM” DO NOT GIVE YOUR INFORMATION ON ANY SITE THAT HAS NO PRIVACY POLICY OR TO ANY SITE THAT MAY COMPROMISE YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS. AFFILIATES – YOU WILL NOT BE PAID FOR SIGNUPS. PLEASE DO YOUR HOMEWORK.

As an affiliate marketer I’m always intrigued to know why these things happen. In this instance I had not used the service myself and just promoted it because I figured there are probably hundreds of thousands of people out there who would like some free web hosting with no ads and with all of the features of a paid service, or at least a good number of them. When the company notified me that they were including Fantastico in the free package I thought it would do even better.

Although I didn’t focus a huge amount of promotional effort the signups did start to flow in so I was initially very pleased, but when more than half of the people I had referred simply let their accounts become inactive I gave the matter some more thought. I had recently written a post over at my internet marketing blog about promoting free products and services and why it was not always a sure thing, so my natural curiosity got the better of me and I decided to sign up for the free hosting service myself, as an experiment.

I didn’t want to buy a domain – I wanted to experience a totally no cost solution as I imagine most people attracted to the service would want too, and, judging by my affiliate stats, that is indeed the case.

I wondered if people were dropping out because the service didn’t do what it claimed, or because it was basically useless. So how did I get on?

Well, signup was very quick and painless and once inside I did a quick exploration to see how things stacked up against my own hosting provider. They did of course fall way short of what I get from my host, but to be fair, this was all free and I have to say I was quite impressed by what was on offer.

Here are a couple of shots of the cpanel interface (click on them to enlarge)

Anyone familiar with cpanel will be know this kind of view, and will see that it is a pretty standard hosting control panel with all the features you would expect. Knowing it is from a free provider however, might surprise many people.

So, having had an initial nose around I logged into Fantastico to see what scripts were on offer. I wanted to set up a WordPress blog for performance testing purposes and was pleased to see that the blogging software was all present and correct (albeit a very slightly outdated version). Happy with that, I can also confirm that the company includes Joomla, drupal, PHPBB, Coppermine, Simple Machines (forum), PHP Website and B2Evolution (blogging) software. OK. it’s not a huge list as you would expect to see from a paid host nowadays, but it’s free, remember.

The web stats on offer is a bit lame but with all the free analytics software around nowadays, who really needs it? All I would say is that to get server stats you would need to install a visitor counter on your pages and I can’t be bothered with that!

For the techies here are a quick few facts. The server runs PHP 5.2, and MySQL 5.0.51-community on Apache version 2.2.10 (Unix). You will get 5 MySQL databases and a claimed 100GB of bandwidth every month and 1500 Mb of disk space. It’s too early for me to talk about downtime and hardware issues but there were some complaints in the members forum area – no great surprise there, you will find the moaners at any hosting company, even the free ones (Update – it would seem that complaints are very often justified and not tolerated by 000Webhost.com who will happily delete your account if they take exception to anything you might say – literally)

Getting back to my experiment, I installed WordPress using Fantastico and all went without a hitch. I hunted down a free template to suit my needs, grabbed all the plugins (a lot) that I wanted and started work on the blog. I have to say that there were very few hitches or issues encountered with the hosting. I used a good number of plugins and none of them failed due to server issues. I did have a couple of problems but these were code related as opposed to being caused by server settings. All in all the installation and set up of a totally new WordPress blog went very well. I had to change a few CHMOD settings here and there to enable me to edit theme files but the FTP interface in cpanel was cool and easy to use and for everything else I used FireFTP anyway.

After setting up my site there was some brief downtime due to the fact that your account needs to go through an approval process to weed out the abusers who always come along to free sites unfortunately. It’s good to know that the company weeds out the bad apples as you don’t want to be associated with a sub domain that earns itself a reputation for spamming or other illegal or dubious activity. The site was not down for very long at all in any case.

The only issues I’ve noticed are occasional MySQL quirks and sometimes when posting to the blog an error screen. This is odd because on checking the WordPress control panel the post has been put into the unpublished drafts. Those glitches aside, so far so good.

My questions remained unanswered though. Why did so many new users of the service drop out without ever using it? As far as I can tell it’s a bargain at the price. Why use WordPress.com when you can host your own blog and have complete control over content with a free host like this? If you are looking for free hosting, I’d seriously consider giving these guys a go, particularly if you are just setting up a non business related site. For serious business users I wouldn’t ever recommend free hosting, but who knows, maybe one of these days there will be a service good enough even for business users. This free hosting has already moved the goalposts in the traditional “free” web hosting marketplace.

Since writing this piece our experience with this company went rapidly downhill and we would not recommend them at all. Get a free web hosting account with cpanel PHP MySQL & Fantastico at your own risk. 000Webhost are not to be trusted with your data.

Footnote: The blog created in this experiment was once found at http://caymanislands.net76.net but since the company’s abrupt deletion of my files and account it has gone the way of all living things.