Build Your Online Business Using Free Cloud Web Hosting

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Not so long ago, I have provided  a step by step tutorial on how to build a niche website in a very short period of time. Granted, one of the recommended requirements to do so is by getting yourself a domain name and a web hosting provider. The investment in a domain name is really minor compared to that of web hosting, and if this is what’s pulling you back from moving forward, here’s some good news. I will show you the way to getting a fully loaded, no gimmick, no fees or anything related, free web hosting account that runs in the cloud. How’s that sound? Interesting? Read on..

HostZilla’s Free Cloud Web Hosting

Free Cloud Hosting

Having received an email from them about their service, I immediately got intrigued as that “free” word was there. I am all in for experiments, so I went over their website, perused it a bit and bam, I said to myself, nothing to loose. I have some unused domains anyway, so why not give it a shot. With that said, I created an account, went to the order process and selected “free”. And, that’s about it on creating an account. After that, I logged in my cPanel account, installed WordPress and all other essentials.

What Does The Free Cloud Hosting Include?

Everything! Yep, from cPanel, to unlimited bandwidth, fantastico installer for WordPress, unlimited mySQL databases, domains and add-ons, email, website builder, the whole shebang. This is nothing close to WordPress.com or Blogger, or any other free hosting accounts. HostZilla’s free cloud hosting has the exact same features as a normal shared hosting account, with the difference that it cost nothing. Hard to believe, right?

Right, because there is a but, and there is always a “but” does it not? And the “but” is that, the free account is limited to 100mb of disk storage space. I know what you’ll say, this is hardly enough, but before you start complaining, it really depends on what you are thinking of doing. Unless I calculated it wrong, with 100mb, you can have something between 50 – 100 pages of content in there. Also, this space should be good enough for static web pages, small niche sites or landing pages ;-).

If your site will use primarily text, run on WordPress, a decent theme and the essential WordPress plugins, this should suffice, at least to get you jump started. Most of the time, large images and videos are the culprit for taking up space, so rather than uploading it to HostZilla, use free online storage sites, such as JustCloud, DropBox, Amazon Cloud Server, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. Those three combined can get you more than 20gb of space for your media files. If they are great videos, heck use YouTube, and embed it in your site, lol.

Anyway, if you do ran out of space quickly, either your site is doing well (which is good news) or you have tons of crap in there. Let’s assume the positive and say that your site is doing well and you need more disk space. For that matter, you should now be able to afford a Premium Hosting and all you have to do is upgrade your account. HostiZilla’s Standard Premium Hosting is ridiculously cheap. It cost under $60 a year and aside from the limitation of disk space storage being lifted, you get more features like double your CPU resources allocation, etc.. Heck, they are cheaper than my current provider and it is a cloud server. Fast!

My Experience With HostZilla

Hmmm, not much to say for the moment as they are relatively new comers and I just created a site with them about a week ago. So far, I am very satisfied and do not have (yet) any negative remarks. I did ran into a small problem because of the name servers, but I used their live chat support and I got help immediately. How’s that for a free account 🙂 Oh well, my initial assessment could change in the long run, but for now, thumbs up.

Anyway, the site I created and hosted with HostZilla’s free cloud hosting is FreeCloudApplications.net. The very first post is, guess what, HostZilla’s free cloud hosting (did not have that much of imagination, lol). So far, everything is looking good. Googling for the term “Hostzilla Review” shows that three out of the first five spots are related to my site. Not bad.

Google Hostzilla Review

On a side note. Note that aside from BizSugar, Scoop.it, the content curation tool I am using, suggested by my friend Ileane of BasicBlogTips, is right there, so something to think about for your SEO. Also, note the date.. that’s Google fresh in action. How long is it going to stay there I don’t know but being there has its perks.

Which leads me to another thing… HostZilla has an affiliate program too. The commissions are not as high as its competitors, but then again, the services they offer are cheap, and that could lead to higher conversions. The links contained here in this post are my affiliate links, but, unless you purchase right out from those links, I don’t get paid. If you decide to go for the “free account” and later upgrade, I don’t get nada, shhh. That’s the bad part of it. Anyway, it is also an income opportunity and if you are wondering, YES, I already sold one… woot

HostZilla Affiliate Program

That’s it. The whole point of this post was to provide you with that (probable) missing part of what you need, to go and build your niche site, or whatever other online venture you are thinking of. There are many niches to explore. You can create a landing page for your product, a squeeze page for a contest, a landing page for renting your luxury apartments in Atlanta, anything. Now you have everything you need to build your website, establish an online presence, or create that niche site you are so wondering if it is going to be a success. No more excuses!

Now, if you are really a total noob on WordPress hosting and don’t know how to create one yourself, I just my free WordPress setup, o head over there to learn more about this offer.

So what do you think? Have you heard about HostZilla before? Do you know of any other provider that gives you free cloud hosting?

DiTesco

DiTesco is a Business and Inbound Marketing Consultant, and founder of iBlogzone.com. iBlogzone's main objective is to help startups and small business owners achieve success in their online ventures. | More About Me and my Digital Marketing Services in SP Brazil.

41 thoughts on “Build Your Online Business Using Free Cloud Web Hosting”

  • Its the first time i hear about this hosting. As you said there is always a BUT , but this sounds like a great oppertunity for alot of people out there looking for free hosting as i once did before buying server space.

    To answer one of your other questions DiTesco, i am unsure what qualify’s as “cloud” hosting. i do know a few other (ad) free host out there, usually with size restrictions like this one but limited support for CMS and the like.

    • Hi John. Sorry for the late response. I agree with you, I think that it is good to good of an opportunity to let it go pass. They just released their service and I am not sure if this is something that will last. I think it will as it is agreat way to offer their services once a user needs more space..

      Yeah, I am for now still unaware of any other similar service.

  • For me this is the first time i heard the hosting while i read your story it seems very useful blog…thanks for sharing this to us….

    • You are welcome. Thanks for stopping by

  • Thanks for the great post! I’m going to give that a try. You’re right that it can’t hurt to try the service, and that it would probably be a good place for static sites. We produce a goodly number of micro-sites for our customers, and this would be a great option for those with smaller budgets to be able to benefit from multiple micro-sites in their marketing arsenal.

    Thanks, my friend!

    • Hi Frank. Sorry for responding a bit late. You are welcome, I am glad that you found a “great” way to to take advantage of this service. You might have just given me a great idea 🙂

  • Hi Di Tesco,
    I have not heard of Cloud Hosting before but it looks like you got some good results using it. Hey, if it is free and you can at least earn a few bucks with adsense and also cloud hosts affiliate program, it may be worth a try.

    The WordPress training tutorial sounds like a good program for the new blogger as well.

    • Hi Justin. Yep, the wordpress training program is great. I might be biased here because it is a program offered by my partner, but I have watched all the videos myself and even I learned a lot. There is a “sneek peek” though, so might want to check it out. All the best and thanks for stopping by

  • Cloud Based Hosting I see the php also moved towards CLoud Like Salesforce Now it better to get and avail better cloud based hosting service instead of others.

  • HostZilla sounds appealing. I might have to give their free account a test drive and check it out. I did see they had some limitations in the acceptable use policy, but all hosts have some form of limitations. I know you haven’t been using it that long yet, but how is the server load? Speed? Uptime? and that type of thing been for you?

    • Hi Ray. Sorry for responding late. For now, I don’t have any negative remarks as of yet. I have not experienced any downtime and the speed in which my site loads is incredibly fast. Then again it is still a small site and I don’t have tons of plugins in there, just the essentials. I like it…

  • Nice one,

    No doubt in that this is right time to use this where you can enjoy with more space and good advantage of this lot of things are include free.

    • I agree. Give it a try and let me know if you do. I would love to hear your experience.. It is always good to know. Thanks for stopping by.

      BTW, did you try it yet?

  • Cloud hosting provides maximum uptime. If one of your nodes is down, not to worry, in just 2 or 3 minutes, it’ll resume normal again.

    • Thanks Ricardus for the heads up. If there is anyone who would how these things work I guess it would be you 😉 Thanks for stopping by and sorry for responding a bit late

  • Hey DiTesco,

    Sounds like a great site. Even at $60 a year, its a great deal! I’m sure for those just starting out and looking to get their feet wet, this is a good option to start off with.

    Anyway, a BIG thank you for the shout out. Maybe they can start with me and then end with you. LOL

    Hugs.

    • Hi Michele. Yep, it does sound a good site and the price is quite good. This is really a great option for those who are just starting (not only) as one can benefit from a full web hosting without having to invest anything up front.

      As for the shout out, you are welcome. A great training program is not easy to find, and with the idea that I am cooking in my “brains”, I think it will be a blast… 🙂

  • Hey DiTesco,

    I used to have a huge amount of accounts with different free hosting companies, but they were all terrible. That was before I started my blog though. I just love the idea of free hosting because you never know when you might need it. For a high traffic site I would defiantly use paid hosting, but since I’m a programmer, sometimes I like to test my code on remote servers and its better to try it on free hosting than on your paid one.

    Thanks for sharing DiTesco. 🙂

    • Hi Sayed. That’s definitely another way to make use of this free hosting. You can do whatever you want. For designers or developers, it could be a great platform to test “stuff” because it is a “normal” hosting environment, with the added benefit of being in the cloud 🙂

      Have you tried it yet?

  • As you said, it is nothing wrong with experimenting with a service which you get for free. You stand nothing to lose. Nice opportunity for newbies who wish to try their hands in web hosting. Useful post.

    • Hi Jane. Absolutely.. Sometimes there are those that for one reason or another find excuses for not giving things a shot. There are free everything now, including this awesome hosting provider. All that is missing is their motivation to get things done 🙂

      On a side note.. I am not a noob (anymore, lol) and I using it for a lot of things. I think that is awesome for static and landing pages. At least if one wants to stay below the “100mb” limit..

  • Great idea if you want a little IP diversity too. At $60/yr if a site does “break out” it’s not going to break the bank either.
    ~Bruce

    • Well said Bruce. If a site does break out, this is probably one of those situations where it can be good news. And as you said, $60 a year for a “cloud hosting” is really cheap and won’t hurt the bank account either. Heck, I am paying more right now for a shared hosting plan 🙂

  • Hi DiTesco,

    100MB should be good enough for some static site or even for the startups. Nothing is better than free, so looks a good deal. The only issue might be bandwidth limitation which can be checked after some usage.

    I also have few domain names available, might give it a try. Thanks for sharing.

    • Hi Sanjeev. Yep, good for a lot of things actually. 100mb may not seem a lot, but I am running the site I created with no “saving” from my part and as of now, I still have 75mb to go, lol.

      As for the bandwidth… Nope, no problem there. The free account is also unlimited bandwidth. How cool is that?

  • I have never tried cloud web hosting before. I have been using other hosting sites but my privileges are limited. Is this offering an unlimited number of subdomains and databases? Can i host an unlimited number of domains with it? I’m sorry, i’m not really good in choosing a hosting site.

    • Hi john. To answer your question.. YES, the free version, is all unlimited with the exception of the disk storage space. Obviously, you can only do so much with 100mb. However, if you like their service, you can upgrade to the Premium version and disk storage restriction is immediately lift off. Really cool…

  • Its the first time when i hear about this hosting,seems to be a very good service especially for beginners and good way to promote the hosting service, free to test the hosting service and if you like service will buy one premium hosting, a good idea to promote a business

  • This really sounds like an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed if one is starting out in the online business world, or if one wants to have a static website. I think that BUT is fair considering how much it would cost to pay for hosting in other places. And you are absolutely right, if you reached the level where 100MB is not enough, it probably means you are ready to be a premium user. Thanks for informing us about this – I haven’t heard of it before reading your post, and I think I will make use of it in the future.
    Merry Christmas, Leonard

  • Hi DiTesco, my simple wp site with ZERO traffic and only 2 plugins was punished heavily by HostMonster recently thru their so called ‘Throttling’ hammer and the site was throttled for more than a continous 86000 seconds, and to make it worse, I got no help from HM support other than redirecting me to their knowledgebase for me to fix it myself (what a support…lol)..Anyways, I had been looking to move to a new host for the last 4 days, so many of them out there and today I got an email from HostZilla about their Fre e Cloud Hosting, I went thru all the details and it really sounds too gud to be true, but yeah I am gonna try it for sure for one of my unused domains. Just one thing that caught my attention is the ‘CPU Resource Allocation’, I am wondering if they could also use this feature just like ‘Throttling’ by HM. Today I also read about Amazon Cloud CDN which is like damn cheap and I am definitely going to go for it too. Your help in choosing a webhost will be a greatly appreciated 🙂

    • Hi Riz. Curious you asking exactly today, because a friend of mine, although a different problem from yours, asked me today what web hosting do I recommend. I have been using Hostzilla for a while now and upgraded to their premium account recently. Both free and premium versions worked well and the support I got from them was fantastic, considering that one site I had there was hacked. Sent them a support ticket and not only did they immediately restored a backup for me, they also told me where the problem was coming form so I fixed it.

      Anyway, another hosting I recommend presently, because I am using it and very satisfied with them is iPage. Take a look at their current offer which is a good deal.

      Lastly, it is really weird, why HM is throttling your site. It does not make sense even for a shared hosting, if you have very little traffic and not using too much resources. You should at your log, to see what’s going on. I hope you are not a victim of fake traffic…

      • Hi Ditesco, actually HM has been earning ‘negative’ ratings coz of their so called ‘Throttling’ process, if you google it, you would find a lot of people complaining about that, I might have not believed them until this thing hit me too and now I know all of them are being true. Most of them complained that this is a trick through which HM asks them to get into their VPS/dedicated server services to avoid throttling. As per them, its not just high traffic that can cause throttling but it could also be a nasty piece of code in our site and they wont help you trace that culprit code. The logs are also not updated so that I can try figure out, and I am not gonna ask them for it too coz have already decided to say bye to them.

        Anyways, I had shortlisted GoDaddy Deluxe, iPage, WebHostingHub and now HostZilla, so doing a research on all of these, so lets see which one do I finally close on. Although I have created a free account with HostZilla and will put one of our Group’s static site.

        While I was typing this reply I was also chatting with the Sales support of iPage and I found that the iPage User Agreement is not updated as point number 2.b.i states that they may charge a minimum of $35 as an early cancellation fee however their Sales Rep told me that its not applicable and the agreement is not updated. This doesnt sound gud, but have taken an email copy of the chat just in case I need it 🙂 What do you say about this?

        • Hi Riz. Sounds like those guys over at HM are pretty desperate in increasing their client base, which is OK, but doing it completely wrong. They could have just given a free “trial” for 30 days and let people decide. The support sounds bad too, so I was going to definitely suggest you to say bye-bye to them 🙂

          iPage early cancellation fee not being updated is something that I am not aware of. I had them before, cancelled it (not because I did not like it, was just not using it yet at that time), and rejoined. I did not pay any cancellation fee, so I guess that if you do decide on them, you can keep that email, just in case 🙂 Anyway, regardless of which one you will choose, I am sure it will be a relief compared to that of HM and a well informed decision. Good luck and do keep me posted.. I am curious which one you will go for, lol

          • lol…iPage and HostZilla made it to the finals…lets see who wins 🙂 Would be doing a thorough study and then close in on one, and I really hope my hard work would not disappoint me 🙂 Will share the results of the final winner in a week’s time alongwith reasons so that other readers could also be benefited.

  • Hey there, I’ve finally moved to iPage and HostZilla, both 🙂 Actually I have created a free account with HostZilla and placed 2 of my business group’s static websites and the sites are working absolutely fine. The default Cpanel theme of HostZilla is quite boring as compared to X3, so I logged in a support ticket to change it to X3 and to my wonder, the ticket was actioned within 5 minutes and theme changed 🙂 …I just hope I am not their ‘only’ customer…lol..just kidding…To quote one more, I had mistakenly miscoded the .htaccess files which was making the 2 static sites unable to load, I logged a ticket and it was again actioned promptly and the support guy corrected the code and the sites went up and running like star 🙂 HostZilla looks like a promising new comer in the cloud hosting segment with great support and feature rich Cpanel, however there is just one thing which I didnt like is that they dont give Secure Mail service.I shall keep the static sites with them in the free account and then monitor and test HostZilla’s performance on a Wp site too. Now, talking about iPage – I had actually closed in on iPage and luckily I got their offer for a price of 2.95 so I made no delay and signed up instantly :-)I have hosted a static site and a Wp site with them and so far it looks nice, lets see how things move ahead. They too have a prompt actioning of support tickets so iPage sounds like a great proposition of performance and value for money at the same time. DiTesco, Wish me good luck for my blog which I had been planning to launch for more than a year and its taking shape now…lot of credits go to this site of yours for the great wp tips, am a regular reader of this site now 🙂

  • Thanks for this post. I have signed up with Hostzilla and tried to install a php application. At no place in the system or in hostzilla email am I able to find the webhost name. Localhost does not work. Any suggestions?

    • Hi. The webhost name? Is that the nameservers you are referring to? If it is, write to support and they will tell you where to point your nameservers at… I asked them and they replied quite quickly. Use their online chat. Sorry, I upgraded my account to premium so I can’t remember what the nameserver for the free account is. It is different from the premium.

  • I agree with you that the free service offered by Hostzilla is pretty good but remember that you always get what you pay for so I’m not expecting a premium service.
    I currently have 4 free accounts and all work ok and I have no complaints as it’s “free”. However, their PREMIUM service is a different matter.
    I currently have an “Enhanced” service (mid range) on which I host 3 wordpress blogs all with minimal traffic and utilization. I have pulled my main blogs off of this service because of the continuous outages which occur with regular monotony. I’m now 6 months into the contract and now just using it to park my minor sites.
    I can tell when my site is down when all the email (outlook) accounts starts to error. I have given up contacting support as the problem will go in about an hour which is the time it takes support to respond to the problem. All support is located in Mumbai and I have found that the problems seem to fix themselves by the time they get into it.
    My advice is to use the “free” service but stay away from any of the Premium services. My advice is to use Hostgator which has always lived up to its reputation over the past 8 years that I have used them.

    • Hi Fred. Thanks for your input. This really means a lot as users can make a better decision when opting for a service. I do use their premium service and also experience a bit of outage problem. I guess this has a lot to do with the fact that they are relatively new and still has some room for improvement. For now, the outages are not (yet) causing my niche sites any problem. As far as support is concerned, I have three times made use of their help and they were pretty prompt at it. I may have been lucky to have gotten someone who was willing 🙂

      Anyway, thanks again.

  • Hi Ditesco,
    I have just opened a free account and experienced a minor hiccup. The support team was very prompt to advise me in overcoming that.

    May be I should have read the specification of free service before signing up, but the OS is Lunix and server is Apache.

    I am primarily a classic ASP and ASP.net guy. I guess there is no way to develop classic ASP on these servers. Or is there a way?

    Thanks in advance for your advice.

    • Hi Luke. Sorry to hear about that hiccup. To be honest with you, I am not really a hard core tech guy, so I could not answer your question with confidence. If their support team can’t help, then I am afraid that you will only be able to use them with their OS and server.

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