Is it possible to host your website for free, with your own domain name, running WordPress? The answer is Yes, and in this article, we will explain how to configure a free WordPress hosting with your own domain. WordPress is a CMS software, responsible for almost 70% of the internet hosted websites nowadays. Initially meant for hosting blogs, it nowadays has several plugins and themes that allow any usage.
Hosting at WordPress.org with a shared domain
WordPress offers free hosting for any blog, using their subdomain. This way, your website name will remain yoursite.wordpress.org. Although this is a very commonly used alternative, WordPress.org hosting offers a very limited set of features for your website.
It also looks unprofessional to have your website hosted without a custom domain. Copahost offers cheap domain registrations for your website, giving out a custom domain name for free for the first year.
Self-hosted web sites
Of course, it’s possible to configure a web hosting server at home, without any cost, and have your WordPress website running on it. In this article, we explain how to configure a web server and a database in a personal dedicated server. But, there are some negative points you must consider:
- Expensive energy bill
- Web site monitoring efforts
- Firewall and security configurations
- Hard disk and backups maintenance costs
If you don’t keep your personal web server up to date with all the security updates and patches, you will run a severe risk to have your server hacked. Despite WordPress being responsible for more than 70% fo the internet nowadays, it has several security flaws.
As we have more than 10 years with experience managing, configuring and securing WordPress servers, we can advise always to find an experienced hosting provider with vast experience on it to help you.
Professional web hosting services for free?
Basically, there are two kinds of hosting services available: free hosting and paid shared hosting. Copahost is a professional web hosting provider, and we will give you free WordPress hosting for testing with your custom domain name for free, for the first 30 days.
This is a golden opportunity for you to try our services, and test our WordPress capability, with risk-free. Simply use this coupon code: 30DAYSFREE as you order your WordPress hosting plan. It includes a one-click WordPress auto-installer, email accounts, unlimited databases and our 24/7 qualified technical support.
You can now choose your hosting plan here: https://www.copahost.com/en/web-hosting
WordPress and cPanel
WordPress works smoothly with cPanel. But, we can recommend the DirectAdmin control panel, which is faster and easier to use. It also offers one-click autoinstall for your WordPress website and Free SSL certificates. Our tests have shown DirectAdmin to be up to 5% faster than cPanel due to having less Linux crontabs and caching services running at once.
Which free PHP hosting is recommended?
Most of the free hosting companies nowadays have performance and support issues. At the point you will need technical support assistance, they will simply ignore you, due to the high amount of users attended.
Free hosting companies often have blacklisting issues. What does it mean? In shared hosting servers, the websites will share one IP. If one single user sends spam or is infected with viruses, the whole server gets blacklisted. In other words, your website will have a browser security alert in a matter of days. This can cause severe reputation problems for your domain name, and this is very hard to recover in the future.
Wpnode case study
We have tested the services of Wpnode, which offers free WordPress hosting. They have a free plan with no email accounts, no backups, and only 1GB of disk space. No technical support is included as well. As per our tests, the server had its IP blacklisted within 1 month and offered a poor performance.
They host a vast amount of customers on the same web server, decreasing a lot the performance of it. Just like 000webhost and Awardspace, Wpnode is shown to be interesting only for studying and testing purposes, but not for hosting your website with a custom domain. Such phishing warnings in a blacklisted server can cause severe and irreversible damage to your own domain name over time.
