Saturday, November 22, 2008

Some free PHP-MySQL hosts

Want to have a small DB driven web/WAP site??? Here I write about a few selected ones.
FreeHostia
If you want almost hundred percent uptime then this one is surely for you. Although they're low at bandwidth(5GB/month) and space(250MB) but they've excellent uptime and very fast servers. A couple of demerits are that you can't use more than 1.3% of their CPU time per day and another is that file size limit is 500KB. The former implies that if your site uses heavy scripting, lots of modules and non-optimized code and you've lots of visitors then you'll cross the 1.3% limit with ease. Another demerit is that fsockopen, mail etc are disabled. Pros: no ads *grin
VNDV
Here you get 6gigs of space and 50 gigs/month bandwidth!!! File size limit is 8MB. Most serious con is that they remain down a lot and for very long periods. Recently they had some disk related problem so all sites went to read only mode and they had to run fsck(file system check). It used to happen twice every week and your site remained down for about 4 hours. But now they've solved that problem. Another problem that occured 4 days ago was that they went down for four days and came back today morning!!!!!! fsockopen and mail are not allowed here too. Pros: no ads, lots of space and bw.
Byethost
They've 300MB space and 20 gigs of bandwidth. Pretty decent enough. And recently they've also allowed fsockopen. And smtp through google's smtp server. Fastest host I've ever used. Almost 100% uptime. I've never experienced any downtime there yet!! The only and crappiest demerit that prevents you to host a mobile site there is that they filter out most of the mobile phone user agents as spam bots and don't allow access to your site. For a website they're extremely good. No ads here too.
Orgfree
They've 300MB space and unmetered bandwidth. They allow mail, fsockopen and all other bells and whistles of PHP. Butttttttttttttttttttt!! They display ads. Small text/banner ads are displayed on your site. I found a workaround to remove ads. Just set the MIME type of your pages as application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml instead of text/html. But then, IE, FF, Chrome etc won't open your site. Only Opera will. They're good for mobile sites but in their terms they've written that they'll delete mobile sites if detected. That happened to me!!!!
X10Hosting
Crap! Crap!! Loads of crap!!! Thats what I say after using them. They've tougher conditions and they suck at uptimes. I used to experience daily about 2-3 hours downtime in evening. Finally I left them and they deleted my site.

000webhost.com is a scam!!! Don't signup there. They only lure you to get a large user base for spreading their referral program. When you signup, they'll register you at another host which is a free one provided by byethost. Whenever you see a host with Vista Panel, 300MB space just take for granted that it's another free one provided by byethost. Byethost allow you to open a hosting company for free. And thats as crap as byet.

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