Question: In last one or two years, I switched several free hosting providers. At first, all are good. But after a few months, some were gone; some lost all data; some gave long downtime; a few required me to upgrade. I need php and mysql, so do not recommend the providers that do not provide these. How to find a reliable free hosting?

The general rules to choose a reliable free hosting provider are:

Rule #1: If it is “too good to be true”, it always is.
If a free hosting provider provides your mysql, ftp, php, email, cgi….. without putting any advertisements, you should think twice before using their services: how can the guy cover the cost? Maybe in the next morning, the provider disappears because they cannot pay the datacenter for the server.

There is an over-quoted sentence in web hosting industry “you get what you pay for”. It is true, sometimes. But often, you do not get what you pay for.

Generally you may get some kind of customer support for paid hosting; while for free hosting, support may be available only through community. In addition, there are fewer restrictions for paid hosting. But if it is just a personal homepage, do you need these? Shared hosting is not expensive nowadays, but ten dollars a month for users in some less developed countries may be not cheap.

The keyword is your requirements. If you need someone monitor your site 7/24/365 and want a clean homepage, you should go paid hosting. For the hardware, a lot of free hosting providers use very decent servers and transit, which maybe are better than those used by some paid hosting providers.

As suggested by its name, free hosting means you get a hosting account for your domain or a hosting account with a free domain name (usually a sub-domain name) without paying the provider. Most free hosting providers give you some disk space for you to upload your files. Once your files, usually html files, are uploaded, you will make a presence in WWW world: other people are able to visit your “homepage”.

In addition to this traditional free hosting, which gives you disk space for you to upload and store your files either through ftp or web interface, there is another type of free hosting that gives you a forum (free forum hosting), a blog (free blog hosting), or a portal, e.g., phpnuke, mambo (free portal hosting). For this type of free hosting, you usually get a pre-installed forum/bbs, blog or portal. In most cases, you are not able to modify these files because all users share the same files. Then, where are my data? The trick is most of your data are stored in a database (usually a MySQL database); each user will have a few tables for his forum, blog or portal. This is sometimes referred as multi-forum hosting, multi-blog hosting or multi-portal hosting. Thanks to the “open source” and GNU or similar licenses, a lot of database-driven scripts (bbs, blog, content manage management system, guestbook….), with some modification, can be used for multi-users without installing the scripts again and again for each user.