FREE Shared Hosting is Available

Valeyard

Hello people May the Fourth be with you! 🥳

Everyone loves a good low-end deal and free is the lowest-of-the-lowest cost so I thought I would let the community know where to get the best free cPanel hosting around. Yes the best, guaranteed. Better even than most paid shared hosting. 😍 Fully suitable to run a normal sized Forum. It is offered through WSWD's low-end division InstaFree. I am not a representative of InstaFree, but I'm sharing the details for your convenience. They have just added a server in Germany as well for those who would like European free hosting. Details below:

Free Shared Hosting

10 GB Disk Space
100 GB Bandwidth
99.9%+ Uptime
1 Gbps
5 Databases
cPanel
Softaculous
Litespeed Webserver
PHP Selector (currently up to 8.1)
Jailed SSH on request
SMTP relay using a Mailbaby/Mailchannels hybrid for all outgoing mail to provide "darn near 100% mail deliverability".
Free Let's Encrypt SSL
DDoS protection
Pretty much all the features you get from a regular paid shared host
Your choice of location US or Europe
You shall not register from a Forbidden Country.
Sustainable & Reliable: Free hosing provided since 2010
No ads
No posting
No nonsense

Server locations: Dallas, TX | Los Angeles, CA | Seattle, WA | New York, NY | Nuremberg, Germany

Some 2021 Uptime stats: Dallas 99.976% | LA 99.991%

The current forbidden country list: Afganistan, Africa - Continent, Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, China, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Ivory, Coast, Kosovo, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Myanmar, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi, Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Somalia, Spain, Sri, Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen.

For more information or to sign-up head to: https://www.instafree.com/

Zedd

why don't you accept orders from Singapore?

Valeyard

Zedd why don't you accept orders from Singapore?

They don't it's explained here: "Our parent company, WSWD Inc. has been in the hosting business since 1996, InstaFree since 2010. During that time, we have learned a great deal about the likelihood of spam, copyright violations, and illegal material coming from certain countries. Our list exists because we have 20 years of real client data. Every country on the list is there because of past abuse by clients (paid and/or free). Free hosting makes it even easier for abuse to take place. As a result, we do not provide hosting to countries that have a propensity for engaging in illegal activity."

Someone just about a week ago tried to register from Russia using a VPN and when their hosting application was denied literally launched a DDoS attack (against their website I'd assume I don't know the specific details)! I don't know what problems they would have had from Singapore, but it would not have been due to an isolated incident. There's other free providers out there, some are listed on WHT or sometimes LES & LET. There is also of course FreeFlarum as well. InstaFree though isn't well known and I don't think have advertised it through those hosting forums in many years now, and yes they offer true full-featured cPanel hosting for free not crippled hosting that many others offer or hosting with forced ads or forum posting.

RiversideRocks

I'd recommend using freeflarum over instafree, free hosting by a for-profit company is almost always a red flag, see 000webhost.

Valeyard

For full disclosure - I'm a very happy client. valeyard.net has been on IF since 2017 with no problems. Can confirm they are nothing at ALL like 000webhost.

CyberGene

What's the business model? Are they selling personal data?

Valeyard

CyberGene It's a sustainable low-end service offered by the parent company WSWD essentially (although a quick search reveals they took over the brand from a previous provider). So the business model is to sell shared hosting here or to have people upgrade to IF paid plans @ $12/year if their usage requirements are too high. If too many people were to sign up they would halt sign-ups.

They don't make money from the free hosting obviously, it's a loss-leading product. No they don't sell your data. View their listing on FreeWebspace.net and what appears to be the last time they actively advertised the service on the FWS forum way back in 2017 here.

They run a tight ship - to quote from the 2017 FWS forum ad:

How do we keep the servers in such good shape?

It's easy! We don't allow spammers, scammers, and other garbage users to invade our servers. Abuse our TOS...you're gone...permanently. You send one piece of spam...you're gone. Have something to hide from us and sign up with a proxy...you're gone. All our IPs are 100% clean, unblacklisted, and there's a reason for that. We don't put up with the crap that other free providers welcome to boost their numbers.

WSWD

Hi all!

Owner of WSWD/InstaFree. Just thought I would drop in to address some of the questions. Valeyard has definitely piqued my interest in Flarum. I haven't used it [yet] personally on any of my sites, but I know it's an awesome piece of software, and I absolutely intend to use it in the very near future. Love the look!

What's the business model? Your data is never sold, or used anywhere outside of your account...ever. That has always been the case and it always will be the case. We don't allow disposable email addresses, because they expire and we can't get a hold of you if we need to, not to mention if you are subscribed to threads, your email address would constantly bounce, and cause all sorts of havoc with our email/IP reputation. However, a lot of people sign up with with emails like instafree@yourdomain.com, etc., instead of the email they use on a daily basis. Zero problems with that. We definitely don't send spam, and don't send any emails at all really, outside of a major outage or such. I'm sure Valeyard could attest to that.

Why was IF created? There are people who want to run small personal websites, sites for school projects, family websites, etc. That's largely what we concentrate on. We have personal resumes, family geneology sites, you name it. Most of those people use such limited resources, If you have a super busy website that needs a ton of resources, we probably aren't for you. I can't think of a single InstaFree server off the top of my head that is making money or breaking even. And we're fine with that! IF was not created to make money. That's what our paid host is for. What we hope is that you like our services so much, if your website does get big and require more resources, that you'll consider either an upgrade with us, or a move to our paid hosting company. If you choose to go elsewhere, no hard feelings. If you want your account removed/deleted when you leave, no problem with that either. All your info (except your posts, if you make any) are completely wiped from our database. We have been around since 2010, and our paid host since 1996.

Valeyard

WSWD Wow wow wow, the man himself pops over to say hello! 😍 What an honour and what a very nice compliment you made about the Flarum project!

I've been around long enough to remember the original forums of the 90's all DIY custom coded before BBcode and when you could inject any HTML you wanted, e.g.: <script language="javascript">while(1){alert();}</script> And back then it didn't pop up an in-browser alert, oh no it was an actual window blocking access to your browser which at the time didn't have tabs, it had multiple windows all individually in the taskbar lol. And yes, we used to specify languages like that - IE supported vbscript as well. originaltrilogy.com's forum still to this day runs off 100% custom forum software built by Jay.

Way back then do you know what free shared hosing was? It absolutely was the loss-leading product offered by webhosting companies to gain clients, typically 100MB/500MB but gradually the good hosts who provided it left the market. The idea was that you could have the lowest-end hosting but upgrade later. I honestly do not know of another host that does it the same way as they did 20 years ago other than InstaFree, except now it's not 100MB/1GB it's 10GB/100GB (and the I/O is the real limitation now)!! They didn't have a forbidden countries list way back then, but common guys - we didn't have criptomining, botnets for DDoS, or the email authentication protocols of today. It's 2022, times have moved on and everyone adapted for better or for worse. Most providers stopped giving out free hosting.

Flarum's great. REALLY great as it is - everyone involved in the project should feel very proud of what they've made. Forum software can be hit-and-miss. vBulletin's heyday was in version 3.x apparently, I actually don't remember all I remember is that 4.x is rubbish. Discourse is good for a similar UI to Flarum, but written in Ruby so it's almost impossible to self-host and especially on shared hosting.

Regardless of other forums though I think Flarum is hitting a nice sweet-spot in the market. There's XenForo which is really good but is paid software, and there's other nice options for people and personally I think that's fine. Flarum may not be the right choice for everybody, but it's a damn good piece of kit and as it is I'd say easily an order of magnitude better than vB4 or myBB.

kmetz

Hey there! Just jumping in here as a client of theirs and have hosted previously.

It's a solid company. I've hosted with InstaFree and eventually moved to their parent company for more custom needs such as VPS and Dedicated. Rock solid uptime and quality with competitive prices. +1 for them. All applications go through a review process by admin staff. Exceptions are made on a case-by-case basis when it comes to countries.