By Hunky If you are a hobbyist YouTuber like us, running a small YouTube channel and sharing your views with the world, at some point of your journey, you will grow just enough to feel the need of a website.
A website gives you massive online present, with professional email address and ability to write articles and share high quality pictures.
There are three major aspect of a website, 1. Domain Name, 2. Web Server (Hosting), 3. Your website site (code). For layman, consider this as like you getting a new mobile phone connection. What are the major components of a mobile phone? 1. SIM Card (having your number), 2. The Handset where you put the sim card, 3. Monthly or Yearly Recharge Plan.
Here you may draw a good comparison and connection between mobiles and website.
1. Domain name is your identity, just like your mobile number, they all look similar format, like something.com or something.in but no two are exact same. Just like SIM Card, you have to buy this Domain Name, usually prices are anywhere between 500 to 2000 per year (domain name charges are yearly) and can be purchased using your Indian Debit / Credit Card or UPI payments like PayTM, Google Pay etc.
2. Web Server / Hosting – Just like having a SIM Card wont mean you making any calls since you need to insert the SIM in a mobile to work, Web Server is the place where you park or rather host your domain to function / run. Just like in Mobile Handset world, there are basic mobile to high end ultra flagship, so are the web servers. Depending on the size of the website, one may need to choose his web server. For example, LazyTourer.com is an example website, which may need the most basic & lowest end web server since it receives very little traffic compare to something like FlipKart or Amazon website where lakhs of people visit every second.
3. Lastly the monthly or yearly running plan – Just like you need to recharge your SIM Card plan to keep it running, web hosting will also charge you a fee depending on your usage. Once again follow the same example as Amazon website vs LazyTourer.com where our website may need the most basic plan over such massive Amazon type website.
Can you make a website for Free?
Short answer is no. There may be thousands of article promising free everything, but there are few things you have to pay. For example, your domain name. This one you have to purchase out of your own money. However, you may search and find many good free hosting solutions allowing small websites like ours to start the hosting for learning and development purpose.
Why Choosing Free Hosting?
Short and simple answer is like try before buy.
No, I am not talking about trying website hosting from some large companies like Amazon or Google and using their trial offer. For any try or money back type scheme, you will need an international auto payment enabled Visa or MasterCard Credit Card.
Infact if you search the internet for cheap web hosting for India, you may find hundreds of links offering you so called unlimited website hosting for dead cheap price. But they lack few basic things which one may need in a proper webhosting setup.
When searching for a website hosting, for site likes ours few basic criteria one may need to look for,
1. Go Linux / php type free solutions as they don’t involve any paid software or license.
2. Search for a website hosting offering your cPanel control panel for the hosting. cPanel or DirectAdmin are the two industry leading control panel with best performance and feature set. They are widely used so you will have plenty of tutorial article or YouTube video on everything or HowTo.
3. 24×7 Customer Support since website / hosting may encounter issue at anytime of the day or night and you may need to get help for the same according to your own work timing.
Now if you take these criteria into account, proper paid linux cpanel based shared web hosting with decent server specification and resource limit (like Storage, Bandwidth, etc) will end up costing you around Rs. 2500/- to Rs. 3000/- per year. If you find anything below that, you may see you are compromising on Server Specs and mainly support. And this is the main reason to search and look for free hosting since they are more or less comparable with those hundreds of cheap web hosting solutions filling up your Google Search web page.
Which Free Hosting to take?
If can be frustratingly tough to search and find a good, feature rich free web hosting that works. Some websites would ask you to post in their forums to obtain points to use those points to get their hosting, some may ask you to put their own ads in your website to get their hosting and most don’t offer cPanel or DirectAdmin software for hosting management plan.
Remember, nothing in this world is free, running a web server costs money, time and effort. So when or if someone is offering you, a random internet user, free stuff that actually costs money to run, then they must be using some method to earn some money out of that offer to keep their own lights on.
We have hosted this very website in multiple free hosting and tried few of these. In this article we are sharing our best experience out of them.
Review of – Xsltel OÜ Free cPanel based Linux Web Hosting.
We have hosted our website LazyTourer.com with them for at least 6 months. We have practically developed the site while under their Free Hosting. As per their website, Xsltel OÜ is a proper webhosting company based out of Estonia under European Union offering shared linux / cPanel web hosting and VPS services.
That I feel the biggest advantage of this service since its clear on how they make money. Apart from their regular plans, they have their lite plan, which is free of charge. They don’t require you to run ads or post in their forums to get your free plan.
Secondly, their Free Plan is as good as their paid offerings with some lower resource limit but offering full access with cPanel.
Free cPanel Plan Details
5GB Storage (Including your emails, database, web files, stats, logs) / 50GB Per Month bandwidth / 50 Out Going Email Limit / Apart from that, unlimited everything (Email-FTP-DB-SubDomain-Parked Domain etc)
The Free accounts are hosted in following server configuration, AMD Ryzen 3700X / 64GB RAM / NVMe RAID 1 Storage / 1 Gbps Internet Link running CentOS along with cPanel.
Because they use cPanel, they allow and support AutoSSL integration for Free SSL Certificate (https://) for the hosted domain.
As you may see, this configuration and free plan resource limits are excellent and more than sufficient for running basic websites like ours with popular CMS solutions like Jooma / WordPress / phpBB or such.
You can read more about the plan and service for their product page -> https://www.xsl.tel/hosting/shared-web-hosting/free-cpanel-shared-web-hosting
Good Things we liked
First of all their sound business model along with their server configuration and feature offered. No nonsense straight forward honest approach. Their Server location for our account was in Germany and for Indian users like us, it offered acceptable latency
Matter of fact, when we switched to a paid hosting like HostGator, with their US Servers, ping times are higher than this free host from India.
Secondly we liked the cPanel along with full access allowing us the ability not only to perform advance database, email, FTP operations but DNS Zone edits too.
Thirdly their human touch with support is something one may like since support tickets were handled by humans and mostly we see the same person handling all the tickets.
Most importantly, being cPanel based hosting, they have one click solution for generating & installing SSL certificate for your domain / website via Let’s Encrypt AutoSSL. In todays internet world, search engine rankings will effect greatly if you don’t have https based website.
Then there is access to their professional client panel for support, billing etc. Since they are a professional hosting company, free plan too gets managed from their client area. Neat, clean and effect layout for managing everything, from support ticket to viewing your activity history.
Last of all, their uptime was good, servers were not overloaded so offered good website speed performance once server side setup was complete, it was a very pleasing experience.
Things that we didn’t like
The only complain would be the ticket resolving SLA. Can’t really complain since being a free service, this one place we expected to be slow. We saw only one guy assigned and replying everything in our 6 months of hosting experience but usually due to time difference, reply may come a full 12/16 hours later.
Secondly the down times. Although overall uptime was excellent but when things went down, it stayed down for long since it was evident, one guy is doing everything and by that time he would solve the issue, we saw the length of down time was like 12/16 hours. To be fare, this type of issued happened only couple of times, but as luck would have it, they happened in a critical time for us.
For example, we released a video about NextCloud, we had our article written with various command and viewers opting to follow the tutorial will definitely need to visit out website article for copy pasting the commands. But as luck would have it, just hours after we released our YouTube video, their free hosting server experienced major database crash and it took them few days to get things back online.
Few months prior to this incident, as luck would have it, we experienced another downtime with email service at a critical point our YouTube journey. We were in talks with an advertiser about some ads for our videos and middle of the same their email service went down and once again it took them couple of days to get the service backup again.
Overall Experience
After reading our experience anyone with some web mastering experience can judge & conclude that this service is one of the best free hosting service out there. Yes definitely there are draw backs, mainly with their support SLA but for a student or people like me, considering the features and performance offered, one can easily compromise and adjust with the negatives.
How do you sign up.
Just visit their website and sign up for their free plan. Fill up your actual details, since they do manual checking & verification before activation. It may take couple of days for them to activate your account send you all the login details and credentials.
Free Plan Details -> Free cPanel shared web hosting – Xsltel OÜ
If you have any question from an user of their service, post in comment section, we shall try to share our experience about that.