“Free” hosting can cost you more in time and frustration than a paid plan, so most people ignore the potential cash savings.
InfinityFree wants to prove that a free hosting service can also be excellent.
But is that even possible?
In this review, you’ll find out whether InfinityFree hosting is robust or stable enough for your needs.
You’ll get an overview of the standout features, specs, and support services.
By the end, you’ll know if InfinityFree offers you incredible savings or just a frustrating experience.
First, you’ll learn what this hosting provider is and what you’ll get with the free plan.
Table Of Contents
- What Is InfinityFree Hosting?
- What Comes With a Free Hosting Plan?
- InfinityFree Hosting: Our Review
- Is InfinityFree Hosting Right for You?
- Free Web Hosting: Alternatives to InfinityFree
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS) About InfinityFree Hosting
- Is the Hosting Really Free Forever?
- Does InfinityFree Offer Email or Phone Support?
- Can I Upgrade to a Better InfinityFree Plan?
- Does InfinityFree Offer Unlimited Disk Space?
- Does InfinityFree Provide Domain Registration Services?
- Can I Host a WordPress Website on InfinityFree?
- Which Is Better Value, Infinityfree or Hostinger?
- Decide Whether InfinityFree Will Meet Your Needs
What Is InfinityFree Hosting?
InfinityFree is an ad-supported, free web hosting service founded in 2016. It currently supports over 400,000 websites around the world.
As you would expect, InfinityFree does make money off of you.
They sell advertising on their main site, client portals, and your website’s cPanel.
You can also upgrade your service with (paid) premium enhancements through InfinityFree’s sponsor, iFastNet.
Beyond that, InfinityFree offers an entirely free web hosting that also includes various tools, security features, and even free subdomains.
What Comes With a Free Hosting Plan?
As of 2022, all subscribers to InfinityFree receive the following features with their hosting account:
5GB Disk Space- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Free Subdomain Names
- Free SSL on all your domains
- Free DNS Service
- 400 MySQL Databases
- PHP 7.4
- MySQL 5.7
- Full .htaccess support
To cover all of these features in more detail, let’s jump directly into the review.
InfinityFree Hosting: Our Review
Score and Summary
Overall Score: 3.5/5
Our review found that InfinityFree offers above-average services among free hosting providers and plans.
Most of the problems associated with completely free hosting and free hosts (awful speeds, frequent downtime, poor support) do not seem to be an issue here.
The starting resources are solid, and they can be upgraded.
InfinityFree’s policy of restricting advertising to the main site and panel is a point in its favor.
Most free hosting providers offering similar services will claim the right to put ads on your site—claiming a portion of what you’ve earned.
This hosting company does have some drawbacks to consider.
Not all of their policies are clear, and they will often suspend clients without notice if an automated process detects excessive use or pirated media for example.
We recommend this hosting to you if you have a small site that can comfortably manage the storage space limits.
The Features
Score: 4/5
InfinityFree gets a good score for features. They are mostly on the low end but consistent in many ways with what you’d get in a starter plan. The features below stood out most.
Unlimited Bandwidth
This is an impressive feature for paid plans of InfinityFree, so it’s exciting to see it here at no cost.
The question is, how much is that unlimited bandwidth in InfinityFree worth?
The truth is that InfinityFree imposes a 50,000 hit limit per day.
If your site processes more than 50,000 hits, it may be taken down for the day until the counter resets.
This is not a great interpretation of “unlimited” if you are using the hosting account for commercial purposes.
You never want your site down (especially not as a deliberate action), and 50,000 is not that many hits.
That said, If you can generate 50,000 hits a day, don’t stay on a free hosting service.
Reliability and security should be worth it to you at that point and you can get higher reliability, stronger security, and more features even with a cheap hosting plan.
Free SSL on all your domains
This feature stands out because it’s always convenient to get your SSL certificates directly from the host. Not all hosts offer them, and they can cost $5 or more when purchased independently.
An SSL Certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates sites (to prevent phishing) and encrypts the connection between the site and the user.
These certificates are also important because since 2018, Google has begun marking all sites without SSL with an “insecure” tag.
Most browsers will also now warn users when they attempt to connect to a site that does not have an up-to-date SSL certificate.
Free Subdomain Names
This feature of InfinityFree stands out because it’s how you get a site from InfinityFree for no cost whatsoever.
With most free plans (including this one) you’ll need to pay for a domain name or transfer one over from a different host.
However, InfinityFree offers a subdomain as an alternative.
That eliminates the cost of paying a registrar.
You can get your website built, designed, and navigable without paying a single cent with InfinityFree.
Industry Standard Cpanel
InfinityFree services even include the industry-standard cPanel. This widely used and respected site and server management tool will make handling many tasks easier.
It’s worth noting that even some paid plans out there do not include cPanel for free.
Response Time
Score: 3/5
InfinityFree offers about what you would expect from the response time (the amount of time it takes for a server to respond to a client’s request) of a free web service.
During some days of the testing period, the average response time reached as high as 2.
5 seconds.
There were periods of hours throughout testing days (possibly corresponding to the end of peak times for other sites on the network) when responses were much better.
This arguably isn’t good enough for a customer-facing site.
These loading times could affect your conversion rates until you either upgraded or moved your hosting.
That said, it’s also not the bottom of the barrel.
Generally, you won’t have conversion or visitor frustration problems due to response time unless it’s closer to the 4-5 second range.
Storage
Score: 3/5
If you are Googling around for InfinityFree reviews, you may find that some of them report that this plan includes unlimited storage or unlimited disk space.
If that were true, it is no longer the case.
The language on the InfinityFree site today is quite clear: the storage limit on free accounts is 5GBs.
For reference, 5GB is enough to store about 500 webpages with a moderate amount of text and images.
However, that space will be eaten up quickly if you use high-resolution photos, videos, or product listings with galleries of photos.
The storage space is one of the biggest limiting factors of this free service. Even a blog will only be able to publish a couple years of posts before the room runs out.
This limited space will restrict the kind of projects that are viable with the free account.
Uptime
Score: 3/5
InfinityFree maintains a commitment to 99.9% uptime.
However, it’s not clear whether or how often they can claim that standard.
With most free hosting services, uptime commitment comes with a documented guarantee.
If the site falls below a certain level of uptime, the hosting client is refunded a prorated rate (or all) of their monthly subscription fee.
But in this case, you aren’t paying.
InfinityFree doesn’t have a motivation other than reputation to ensure that their clients achieve that level of uptime.
Whatever the real achieved rate is, it isn’t easy to find on their website.
That said, during the 72-hour testing period, the InfinityFree site we were tracking experienced only around 12 minutes of downtime.
It’s not 99.99%, but it’s still not bad for a free plan.
Access to Premium Features on Demand (And How Hard They’re Sold)
Score: 4/5
While this review only covers the Free Plan, you can’t overlook the premium features when you’re choosing a host.
Premium features matter because if you do want to upgrade someday, you need to know if that’s easy or worthwhile to do.
You may also want to know how hard you’re going to be targeted with premium offers while you’re using the free service.
First, you should know that InfinityFree does not provide its own premium services.
InfinityFree’s servers are provided by the iFastNet company, and that’s who you deal with if you want your account upgraded.
Here’s a quick survey of the plans you can choose when you upgrade, and what each of them offers you.
| Plan Type | Plan Details | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | Super Premium
|
$4.99/month |
| Mid-range | Ultimate Premium
|
$7.99/month |
| High-end | VPS Server
|
$9.99/month |
Beyond that, it’s worth examining how much pressure you’ll be under to upgrade from the completely free hosting.
They did not get in the way of using cPanel.
While the upgrade options aren’t bad, you should be evaluating a different set of hosts if you plan to use paid services soon. You can learn about some of the best paid hosts here.
Customer Support
Score: 4/5
InfinityFree does not have a traditional customer support team for its free services, so this may seem like an odd place for a good score.
While it’s true that InfinityFree only provides support through its knowledge base and support forums, both of these are surprisingly helpful.
The knowledge base provides guides to cover most of the issues that come up when you’re setting up your site.
The topics are well-covered with good pictures
The customer support forum in particular stands out for the quality of help that is provided there.
The visiting employees seem ready to handle even the thorniest technical questions.
Final Pros & Cons
Ads are annoying, but InfinityFree offers you a good compromise by not putting any ads on your site.
That reserves all of your advertising space for your own needs, and ensures that you completely control all the content a user sees.
The free subdomain that InfinityFree includes with each account ensures that the entire process of getting a small site up and running is free to you.
Thanks to this feature, you never even have to pay a domain name registrar.
cPanel is a server and site management platform.
It’s the tool that you’ll most often need to use to do things like manage your domains, organize files, and handle advanced settings.
It is considered by many to be one of the best control panels, and it plays nicely with WordPress if you plan to use that CMS for your blog/site.
cPanel is included with many paid plans (though not all of them). If it weren’t provided, you would need to pay for it separately.
Even the cheapest paid plans typically include an email account. Some starting plans come with five of them.
This plan comes with zero. Whether this is bad or neutral for you may depend on the type of project you’re doing.
InfinityFree is strict about what it considers to be abuse of its free services.
Most users probably support this. After all, you don’t want a few monster sites eating up the resources being used by everyone.
However, InfinityFree loses points here because it is not always clear what they consider to be abuse.
One of the most common complaints on the InfinityFree forums is that users are being suspended without notice.
Some level of automation seems to be involved in handing out these penalties, and as a result, you will have to deal with your site being down until you can reach a human.
That may take days.
You know that when you choose a free service, you’re the product.
As true as that may be, many users wish InfinityWeb was a bit more straightforward about what data is collected and how it is used.
The most you are told is that InfinityFree may sell your data to trusted (but unspecified) third parties.
Is InfinityFree Hosting Right for You?
InfinityFree hosting may be the best free hosting option you will find online.
Unfortunately though, even the best free services are not much of a match for the needs of most online businesses.
Marketplaces and even moderately successful blogs will quickly hit the 5GB storage space limit.
InfinityFree still scores high because, for what it is, it could be of great value to you.
It could be a great service to use as a backup when you need small or time-limited projects or your a beginner and just getting started.
Here are some examples of sites that would likely thrive on the hosting offered here:
Your Personal Portfolio Site
There’s no reason to pay hosting fees for a site that’s a glorified LinkedIn profile.
The resources that InfinityFree offers you are perfectly adequate to run a site with 5-15 pages detailing your accomplishments and featuring several high-resolution images.
A Companion Blog to Another Site You Own
While you shouldn’t rely on this free hosting service to support your main money blog, it may be a perfect option to handle smaller ones that you’ll need to create as part of longer campaigns.
For example, Imagine that you want to target a longtail term related to your blog, but you’re worried about diluting the site’s SEO viability by adding new topics.
That’s where this free hosting service comes in.
The free plan gives you plenty of resources for a small blog that supplements your primary one.
Landing Pages/Brochures
Landing pages may only require a few web pages until it’s time to throw them out so you can promote a different affiliate product.
The free plan has enough power to serve as a host for landing pages when you’re working with short-to-medium length campaigns.
It could also be useful if you wanted to build an entire site around just one product and its advantages, sort of like an online brochure.
A Hobby/Testing Site
Maybe you just want a hobby/testing site that lets you play with graphic design, new plugins, or other experiments.
This is another situation where InfinityFree can provide you with a great amount of value.
While InfinityFree probably has no future holding up money sites (websites build with the sole intention of making money), it can still be a valuable tool.
If you do need free hosting services, but can’t go with InfinityFree, there are still some options to consider.
Free Web Hosting: Alternatives to InfinityFree
InfinityFree isn’t going to be the right web hosting company for everyone who needs a free host. Here are some alternatives
Hostinger
Hostinger offers a free hosting tier that’s powered by 000webhost.
You may remember this web host from when a massive hacking attack targeted them.
Though the company has massively overhauled since then, they are still fighting for
The free web hosting plan comes with a basic set of features you can use to host a small site including a free domain.
For comparison with InfinityFree hosting, here are the features offered by the Hostinger free service:
- 1 Website
- 300 MB SSD Storage
- ~300 Visits Monthly
- Limited Bandwidth (3 GB)
- 1 Database
- 99% Uptime Guarantee
These features aren’t really as strong as the set offered by InfinityFree.
For example, you only get 300MB of storage at Hostinger instead of 5GB.
Additionally, 300 visits monthly is a suffocating limit, far more so than the 50,000 hits daily that you’re allowed with InfinityFree. InfinityFree really does offer quality hosting services.
GoogieHost
GoogieHost is a free hosting provider that has been around since 2012.
Like InfinityFree, they are supported by ads. Also like InfinityFree, the ads will not appear on your website.
Instead, you’ll see them when using the main site or control panel.
GoogieHost advertises the following features for their free plan:
- Free Sub-Domain
- Softaculous Auto Installer
- 24/7 Support
- 100GB NVMe SSD
- Malware Protection
They claim to offer email support to their clients in addition to the typical knowledge base and community tutorials.
Some clients have experienced problems maintaining secure connections with this host.
It may be best to wait until an update before signing up.
ByetHost
ByetHost is powered by iFastNet, just like InfinityFree is.
However, the ByetHost owns, manages, and maintains their own clustered server within that network.
Despite selling services from the same partner, ByetHost is different in some key ways.
It’s not clear how ByetHost profits, but some have accused them of redirecting client traffic toward their own sites.
ByetHost promises no ads at all.
The features are comparable, though InfinityFree offers significantly more storage:
- 1000 MB (one gigabyte!) Disk Space
- FTP account and File Manager
- Control Panel
- MySQL databases & PHP Support
- Free tech support
- Addon domain, Parked Domains, Sub-Domains
- Free Community Access (Forums)
For even more free web hosting solutions have a look at our article: How to Get Free Hosting in 2023.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS) About InfinityFree Hosting
Is the Hosting Really Free Forever?
InfinityFree’s web hosting services have been free since the company first began operating in 2016.
In that time, no attempt has been made to force free users on the platform to transition to the paid services.
The policies here, like any others, are subject to change.
There is no way to guarantee that the services will be free forever.
Does InfinityFree Offer Email or Phone Support?
InfinityFree does not offer one-on-one email and phone support when you have problems.
In virtually all cases, you will be directed to the knowledge base or the support forums where questions are discussed.
Can I Upgrade to a Better InfinityFree Plan?
InfinityFree does not offer upgrades to their plan. There is only one plan available, and it is the free one.
You can purchase upgrades through the company that provides InfinityFree’s server space (iFastNet).
iFastNet offers an expanded set of services, including shared, cloud and premium hosting.
Does InfinityFree Offer Unlimited Disk Space?
InfinityFree does not offer unlimited disk space.
This claim may be repeated in older reviews, but it is no longer offered.
You will be limited to a total of 5GB of space.
Does InfinityFree Provide Domain Registration Services?
InfinityFree does not offer domain registration services, and the free plan does not also include a free domain.
When you sign up, you can pick a subdomain from one of several major domains.
If you do not want your site hosted on a subdomain, you will need to register a new one elsewhere.
Can I Host a WordPress Website on InfinityFree?
Yes, you can use the free hosting for a WordPress website.
The free plan includes the Softaculous Installer that is capable of installing WP (among many other software tools) quickly and easily.
Which Is Better Value, Infinityfree or Hostinger?
Despite InfinityFree’s Free Hosting service not costing a dime, Hostinger’s lowest plans provide you with greater value.
With LiteSpeed server software, SSD storage, and 24/7/365 support, Hostinger delivers superior speed and many helpful features. InfinityFree’s lack of features – no optimized server tech and no email or phone assistance, for example – means you’re likely better off with Hostinger’s affordable costs than you would be with a free hosting plan.
Decide Whether InfinityFree Will Meet Your Needs
InfinityFree is considered the best of the free hosts by some site owners.
Now, you have a better idea of whether it can help you.
You’ve learned about all the most essential features, the pros-and-cons, and even the notable competitors.
Use what you’ve learned to decide if you can launch your personal, business, or hobby websites with this free host.
Ready to take a look at some low cost web hosting providers? Have a look at this article: 9 Cheapest Website Hosting Providers in 2023.
