Ok, so everyone loves a freebie. Worse more when it’s saving you from forking out for integral services such as hosting your domain. Most guys would rather sell you these services but instead,Fre FWH or Free Web Hosting offers basic website hosting services for no cost.
What they do sell to you is the domain name (if you don’t have one already but even that is priced quite reasonably) for $8/year (payable via EcoCash) cost which beats competitor name and their listed pricing of US$9.99/year. The FWH website does state that the team behind FWH is looking into offering free sub-domains.
Ideal for smaller businesses
Why is this project even a thing? Well, one of the heads behind FWH, Bukhosi Mhlanga said the project is meant to give any companies, SMEs, developers and people running on tight budgets an opportunity to have a cost-effective solution to have their online presence.
Anyway what freebies do you get for hosting with FWH?
- 1 GB Disk space
- 5 GB Bandwidth
- 5 Email addresses
- 1 SQL Database and;
- A free SSL Certificate
Why only Zim?
FWH offers an explanation for this too:
Due to a lot of spam and unused accounts eating up a lot of space, this service is limited to Zimbabwe for easier management. This makes it easier to provide support as well.
There’s an alternative for South African’s as well and you can visit that version of Free Web Hosting here. This is a great project that gives presence to business that otherwise wouldn’t get as much traffic on the internet thus spending resources on a website would be an afterthought. FWH allows them to get through the door and actually experiment with creating a site.
Where does the money come from?
This business lends itself admirably to the “As-a-service” model. FWH and its parent company end up making its money through domain registrations and renewals which you’re more likely to make with the guys also giving you a free service. In the event that you realise your hosting needs aren’t met, you’ll upgrade and the probability that you’ll upgrade to the parent company who was giving you a free service all along is quite high…
Share
Home
14 comments
There is no such thing as “free” 🙂 at some point they will have to start charging for what they are ultimately paying for in terms of server resources etc or your service will have some “fair usage policy” because imagine if 500 people took this offer and all consumed the 1gb of storage to say the least they would either run out of space or things would slow to a crawl. The free web hosting scene was all the range in the early 2000’s but all the ISP’s worked out it caused way more headaches than the good PR it brought and eventually got rid.
also any business that values its online image will pay for it
Take a look at the T&C’s its a copy and paste job because apparently the site is governed by the laws of England and Wales
Positive. These guys will let you get comfortable and then force you to pay or they destroy your site.
Why be negatitive my brother. Its the kind of mindset that slows down development in Africa.
domain registration for .com is listed at $13.50. assuming this is also payable via ecocash, how can they afford it as on average .com costs $15usd. (let’s use a rate of x3), thats $45zim.
Where are their servers located? It’s relevant because local sites are cheaper for ISPs to serve up, the more we have the higher the chance that internet prices will drop
While that’s true, have you already forgotten about the recent Internet shutdowns? If you host in Zimbabwe and the Internet is cut off like that, you will be affected even if most or all your clients are still connected (think Zimbabweans in diaspora and other foreign clients).
their website appears to be hosted inside the Hetzner network in Germany, assuming free web hosting in a similar location – nothing specifically wrong with that by any means – it does mean it because inaccessible to zimbabweans if government orders shutdowns etc. that being said we not entirely sure if your website would remain working if it was inside zim in the same case
Running servers in Zimbabwe isn’t a viable option for any hosting company at this time. There are so many problems that need to be worked on.
First, colocation rackspace and power costs. These are over 20x higher than any comparative offer in prominent EU locations (UK, Netherlands, Germany, France). Then, once you compare the quality of the facilities in Zimbabwe (management, security, build, loctation) and compare them to the EU counterparts and finally subtract the power stability; it’s not worth the risk.
Second, network affordability is a problem. There are only two “real” fibre operators in Zimbabwe and both of those charge in the region of $30 per 1Mbit of committed connectivity. There are no DDoS mitigation options because the upstream providers have nothing and it’s too costly to afford 50Gbit+ of base connectivity to mitigate these on-network.
Third, network reach and latency is going to wreak havoc for rankings and SEO. Googlebot primarily crawls from Mountain View US (with few exceptions), Yahoo! does all crawling from Buffalo US, and MSN/Bing crawls from key hubs like Cali, Dallas, NYC and Amsterdam – none of which are within 100ms reach. This will mean sites will appear slow to those search engines, even when hosted on the fastest spec server.
To summarise, Zim colocation or server rental is only affordable to an elite list, and even then, such list is narrowed if international clients are being aimed. It makes commercial sense to use prominent, value-based locations for a ‘free’ service like this; after all, the use of OVH and Hetzner are the only reasons such a free service is possible.
In the grand scheme of things, we do have a chicken vs. egg scenario here: somebody needs to kick off a major international hosting presence to drive down bandwidth costs, which will in turn increase capacity and deliver a more stable service. But in the interim, who’s going to spend hundreds of thousands of USDs doing so – and the bigger question, who can afford to pay the extortionate prices in the beginning?
Do u mean free SSL? Is that true?
its probably letsencrypt which is free for all but it has short (90 days) lifetime so you have to automate the renewal (easily done on the web host side assuming its cpanel)
Joke of the year. Even wordpress.com doesn’t give you free hosting – instead they sell ads and can terminate your account whenever they wish. Please stop fooling the non-tech guys to fall for such (free web hosting) scams, because it will never happen. Say free email yes, not a website.
List one more company in your article #GoogieHost
If you are not paying for it then maybe you are the product.
i think you all should try it first before you start criticizing and if u think this is a bad service then go to the paid one