Free WordPress Hosting: Is It Worth It? Data Gives Us the Answer

Hosting is expensive business, no matter how you approach it, and even more so if you’re not collecting any payments up front.

Therefore, where does the money come in to make all this worthwhile for the hosts that offer free WordPress hosting?

More importantly for us – do you get hit with constant upsells after signing up? Do free hosts spam? Are there ads everywhere? Affiliate products? In other words, is your website at risk at any point in time due to the WordPress hosting firm’s natural need to make money one way or the other?

I wanted to know too.

A couple of weeks ago, I launched a couple of WordPress websites running on completely free WordPress hosting accounts. The following is a rundown of what happened:

The business model of free hosts 💰

Right up front, I have to admit that I’m a bit biased when it comes to the topic. I’ve never considered launching anything serious on top of a free hosting platform, and I’m not even talking about free WordPress hosting platform, I mean free hosting as a whole.

But looking at it in hindsight right now … hey, why not?

I mean, I’m positive that free hosting must have advanced and improved quite a bit since my university days – when every computer networks professor kept advising against any sort of free servers and even had data to show the dangers of using such things (honeypot much?).

So, did things change nowadays with free WordPress hosting? 🤔

In short, I am surprised – and happy to report – that both of the free hosts featured here haven’t been hitting me every day or even week with yet another upsell offer. In all honesty, you’ll get much more regular salesy communication from 90% of blogs offering you “a free e-book.”

Basically, what you get with these hosts are some standard welcome / setup emails. Nothing weird, and I didn’t notice my email getting mysteriously signed up for other, third-party newsletters either (I used an original email for the tests). Basically, I just got to enjoy my free WordPress hosting plans with no interruption.

So where is the money made here?

If I’m to guess, the main business model is probably to give you a good free hosting platform and then wait for you to outgrow it. At that point, you can easily upgrade your setup with a couple of clicks. That’s the case with both Byet and InfinityFree.

Naturally, if this is their monetization strategy, they can’t be too salesy from day one, nor can they hit you with one promotion after the other. Basically, if a host wants to sell you on their pro offering then the free offering cannot suck. Nobody will pay money to get more suck.

Okay, let’s get into the whys and hows of free WordPress hosting:

But, why not just go WordPress.com or a cheap paid host? 💡

So, yeah, when it comes to free WordPress hosting, the first thing that comes to mind is WordPress.com. After all, the .com’s servers are highly capable of handling all kinds of traffic; the performance is good, and you get most of the features the stand-alone version of WordPress offers.

But for all of its awesomeness, there are also some trade-offs. Chief among them, you’re basically never in full control of your site, and you cannot freely adjust its features or the appearance. More on the differences here.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I really enjoy what .com is bringing to the table, but for the sake of this comparison, let’s say that what we want is the full, unrestricted WordPress.

That being said, there’s another solution that, albeit paid, is still incredibly affordable. For $3.79 per month, you can get a fully functioning hosting setup with Bluehost, for instance.

For about the price of a cup of coffee per month, you’re not just getting more performance and reliability. You’re also getting a more usable dashboard.

See, part of what that money goes towards is cool add-ons, like a user-friendly interface that lets you:

• Manage updates, including an option to turn on automatic updates.
• Control basic WordPress settings.
• Manage plugins and themes.

And Bluehost will also help you implement caching (speeds up your site) and create staging sites (think of these like a safe sandbox to test changes to your site).

I guess what we’re saying is that paying for WordPress hosting might actually save you money when you consider the time that you spend managing your site (remember – time is money!).

And again, please keep in mind that if you want to roll out your project to the public, most of the time you also need a standalone domain name for the thing, and that is obviously a paid-for extra, hence somewhat defeating the purpose of free hosting.

Anyway, back on topic:

You may also be interested in:

• 10 Best Cheap WordPress Hosting Providers – Expert Compared in 2026
• 8 Best Managed WordPress Hosting Providers Compared (Real Data and Performance Tests)
• 15+ Fastest WordPress Hosting Providers Compared (Based on 28,460 Individual Tests)

The free WordPress hosting contenders 🥊

I’ve been looking long and hard to find some (seemingly) good quality hosts that would also offer free plans.

First things first, you won’t find a free plan with companies that are mainstays of the WordPress hosting industry. No SiteGround, no InMotion, no WP Engine, etc. Basically, none of the companies that come to mind when thinking about WordPress hosting offer a free tier.

So we need to dig deeper.

(And, sorry, I’m sure that all of the free WordPress hosts featured here are awesome companies and that it’s only my ignorance that I wasn’t aware of them earlier. I didn’t mean to make it seem like anyone featured here is sub-par.)

With that being said, the companies I’ve ended up selecting for the experiment have been featured by other reviewers before me, and these brands have also kept popping up at least a couple of times here and there. In other words, they’re not random at all.

The lineup:

• Byet.host
• InfinityFree

First, let’s have a look at what you get with these two free WordPress hosts and how their offers compare:

Free WordPress hosting offers comparison 🔎

Here are the basic details:

(I’ve also thrown in Bluehost – the top cheap WordPress host in our opinion – for good measure, just to have a look at what you get with their $3.79 / month hosting tier.)

As you can see, all those offers are quite different, and while each makes sense in its own right, there are some important details to notice:

• Uptime is not always guaranteed. Byet boasts that it offers the “fastest free hosting,” but there’s not a word about uptime. Speed is great, but it becomes irrelevant if your website is inaccessible – either frequently or for long periods of time.
• Both Byet and InfinityFree don’t limit you on how many websites you can build. That seems better than Bluehost’s ten at first glance until you realize that the real cap is the 5 GB of storage space. There’s only so many websites you can build when you’re working with a 5 GB limit.

Let’s get a bit more in-depth:

How easy they are to set up 🖱️

Setting yourself up with each of these hosts is slightly different, and you’ll have to go through a different set of forms and questions with either of them.

In the end, though, none of them is extra intuitive and a bit cumbersome for my taste. It’s far from what you get with SiteGround, InMotion or others.

Basically, every one of these free hosts has its own quirks and weird elements in the signup process.

When it comes to pleasant surprises, I have to give it to Byet for its quickness when it comes to setting up.

All you do is register for an account, click a link inside a confirmation email, and then log into Byet’s free hosting control panel. From there you scroll down to find the Softaculous Apps Installer link, which then takes you to cPanel. As soon as you log into cPanel, you’re met with a popup window prompting you to install WordPress:

Easy-peezie, lemon squeezie.

For its part, InfinityFree also offers Softaculous, so installing WordPress is just as smooth. However, the account signup process can have some added friction. For example, if you regularly use a non-standard email domain and you attempt to sign up with it, InfinityFree will block you:

Another odd quirk is that when you finish registering for InfinityFree, it doesn’t automatically mean you signed up for the free hosting plan. You must log in and choose it from one of four options:

None of these speed bumps are make or break issues, but they do add some light friction to an otherwise easy setup process. Now let’s take a look at the free hosts’ dashboards:

Dashboard experience 💻

Byet takes an interesting approach with their dashboard because they actually give you two. The first is their own, which is heavily inspired by older versions of cPanel. It’s called VistaPanel:

The second is cPanel itself, which makes Byet not only a free WordPress host, but a cPanel host as well.

InfinityFree has an in-house dashboard, which has a much more simplified feel compared to either VistaPanel or cPanel:

It’s intuitive enough to navigate, though the ads plastered everywhere do get a bit annoying. At the same time, that’s what makes the free WordPress hosting possible so you almost can’t complain about it. If you focus solely on the panel options without the ads, the design is fairly modern and attractive.

When it comes to the WordPress side of things, there’s nothing to talk about, really. Each host gives you access to a standard WordPress dashboard where you can perform every normal WordPress action, so to speak. There are no limitations.

Also, every host gives you the default WordPress plugins pack, consisting of Akismet and Hello Dolly.

Regarding preinstalled themes, you get the standard Twenty Somethings.

Lastly, each host works roughly on the newest version of WordPress, or at least has no problem running the latest version update.

Performance tests 📊

Okay, now the good stuff. So how does free WordPress hosting actually compare to paid WordPress hosting when looking at the performance alone?

Here’s the overall comparison table for all hosts; again, Bluehost thrown in for good measure:

(WordPress testing setup: Twenty Seventeen – no plugins – demo content.)

	Byet	InfinityFree	Bluehost
Server in	United Kingdom	United Kingdom	Provo, Utah, USA
PINGDOM
Perf. grade	B 81	A 94	N/A
Stockholm	1.31 s	0.61 s	1.80 s
San Jose, CA	2.70 s	1.31 s	N/A
New York City	1.83 s	0.91 s	0.85 s
Melbourne	4.73 s	1.62 s	2.14 s
LOAD IMPACT
Tested from	Frankfurt, Germany	Ashburn, Virginia	Palo Alto, CA
Min response time	0.10 s	0.81 s	0.62 s
Max response time	0.18 s	1.81 s	4.9 s

Here are the individual LoadImpact test results:

What you’ll notice right away is that none of those results are actually bad. More or less regardless of the location, we get sub 2-second load times (with the exception of Melbourne). It’s a similar story with LoadImpact tests – again, very acceptable, or even surprisingly good (and I have to give a shout-out to Byet here in particular).

In a nutshell, the performance turns out to be basically the same as Bluehost’s, and in some aspects even better.

Interpret this data as you may, but you have to admit that these free WordPress hosts do have something viable to offer after all.

Pros and cons

With the performance tests out of the way, let’s talk some other details of this whole free WordPress hosting deal. Namely, the pros and cons.

First, the pros:

It’s free. Duh!

And we can stop here with the pros.

I mean, yeah, there’s more when we have a deeper look under the hood, but let’s face it, you’re not getting a free hosting account for the features, you’re getting it because it’s free.

And don’t get me wrong, it being free is a huge pro! It’s the best pro in the history of ever probably.

Next, the cons:

The cons come down to a couple of essential things:

First of all, the servers are heavily limited – as in, you won’t be able to accept a higher volume of traffic.

• They’re good for only simple setups – one website + one database most of the time.
• There’s also slightly lower performance compared to the paid alternatives.
• There are some small glitches here and there. For example, Byet had some problems importing demo content – media files in particular. Perhaps not enough RAM assigned per hosting account?

Secondly, there’s uncertainty regarding the ownership of the site and/or if you can get shut down overnight for whatever reason.

And thirdly, “you’re the product.” Like with everything, if you don’t need to pay for the product, then you’re the product.

This can lead to possible constant upselling, spam, etc. We talked more about that at the beginning of this post.

Bonus free WordPress host 🎁

Byet and InfinityFree are what we call “classic” free WordPress hosts because they build a website’s pages on demand. Every time a visitor clicks on a site, the server queries a MySQL database and uses PHP to assemble the page in real time. This is what most people think of when they refer to a WordPress site. It works great for membership portals, online stores (WooCommerce), or blogs where readers frequently interact in the comment section.

However, for sites like online brochures, landing pages, or portfolios, it’s overkill. These types of sites often have content that doesn’t require much updating. They thrive on static site hosting, load faster, and are generally more secure than their “normal” counterparts. The best part is that nowadays you can spin up a static WordPress site right on your computer and then use a service like Sevalla by Kinsta to quickly launch it on the web.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Sevalla lets you build up to 100 static sites for free. The 1 GB storage space might seem meager, but consider how relatively tiny static WordPress sites are compared to “regular” ones. They’re just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. There is no database. In short, 1 GB is sufficient for most needs and makes Sevalla a genuinely excellent alternative to Byet and InfinityFree.

Free WordPress hosting – is it worth it? 🤔

With all this being said, my final opinion is that, surprisingly, free WordPress hosting is good for running temporary tests or other experimental projects. To prove a concept, to get a site working quickly, etc.

However, at the same time, I wouldn’t risk using it for a business purpose, like e-commerce, or a branding site for a business, or anything similar. Maybe it’s just my point of view, but I just wouldn’t trust my business to a host that I don’t pay money for, hence I have no leverage or no ask when some of my requirements are not being met. Then there’s also the uncertainty regarding the site ownership that I mentioned earlier. Just not the kind of stress I’m willing to deal with. Find out what other people think about free WordPress hosting.

So in a nutshell (albeit just my own personal opinion):

• Free hosting for a pure hobby / no-commercial-intent project? Sure.
• Free hosting for anything more serious? Nah. I’d rather pay even that $3.79 / month with Bluehost or better yet, go with a free static site host like Sevalla.

What do you think? Have you experimented with any of the free WordPress hosting platforms mentioned here? What are your experiences with them? Or maybe there are some other players worth mentioning?