With a name like Douglas McPherson, it’s natural that I would look for hosting that is free or cheap. I managed on free hosting for quite a while, though inevitably ran into limitations. I could get around disk space limitations by linking to media files on cloud storage, (Google Drive for example), and Podcasting services. Eventually I needed to go for (cost-effective) paid hosting with Host Ed.
One free shared hosting service I used was 000webhost.
Register here: http://www.000webhost.com/775966.html.
This was good, up to a point, but limitations on what they allowed me to do on their servers, in terms of updates sent me to Host-Ed.
I am now using a paid hosting package at Host-Ed for all my personal sites. Host-Ed also offers free hosting, but suspended my sites on their free service because of too much traffic. -They strictly limit the amount of RAM on their servers allocated to a free site.
Information from 000webhost.com:
“Founded in December 2006, 000webhost.com has a trusted free hosting members base of over 60,000 members and still counting! Offering professional quality hosting, support, uptime and reliability, we have a great community of webmasters, you’d love to be a part of!
Register now and get it all free:
*** 1500 MB of disk space
*** 100 GB of data transfer
*** PHP and MySQL support with no restrictions
*** cPanel control panel
*** Website Builder
*** Absolutely no advertising!
Register here: http://www.000webhost.com/775966.html.”
You can of course use a totally free service such as wordpress.com, if you don’t want or need your own domain, but many of us, for various reasons want a greater sense of ownership.
You can also get a free domain at https://www.registry.cu.cc/.
I’m not sure if sites using domains with the cu.cc suffix will be indexed by Google. They had stopped indexing such free domains because of the amount of abuse and spam being generated from them.