Your Own Website: Testing Free Website Hosts

Infinity Free

shannonkay.infinityfreeapp.com hosted by Infinity Free | updated

Infinity Free is a good free host for more advanced users who want php support. They support custom domain names, and include a free subdomain. Infinity Free is one of the few free web hosts that includes php support. Most of the free web hosts I test are for hosting static websites.
Thanks to Leilukin for recommending that I try Infinity Free again.

• Set up had an extra step with creating an account at Infinity Free, then creating a "hosting account" to choose a tier. The free tier gives you 5GB of space and supports domain hosting. Infinity Free includes php support, which is rare for free website hosting. They have some low-cost paid tiers email, more space, and other things. I chose the $0 tier for this test.
• My first attempt at testing infinity free was not successful because of DNS errors. I was encouraged to try again. Maybe there was something going on the day I first tried, because I had no trouble this time. Here are my revised results.
• I had already created an Infinity Free account, so I logged in.
• You also need to create a "Hosting Account", so I clicked on Create Account.
• I chose the InfinityFree Tier and clicked Create Now.
• The next page asks me to choose a subdomain. I chose shannonkay as the Subdomain, and infinityfreeapp.com as the Domain Extension, then clicked check availability
• On the Step 3 page, I chose an account label and an "account password" which is less complex and I think used for ftp access.
• Account created! This is the place where I got the error last time. Maybe there was a problem the day I first tried it.
• There's a warning about DNS taking up to 72 hours to propogate, which is pretty standard language. It varies.
• I'm now at the account page for this "Hosting Account" that I labeled shannonkay test site
• I'm going to try the File Manager. It looks like it's a web-based ftp client logged into my account. There's a file in the root folder named DO NOT UPLOAD FILES HERE.
• I clicked on the htdocs folder.
• Inside /htdocs there is a blank file named files for your website should be uploaded here! and an index2.html file, which has a bit of instruction.
• This is where I want to upload my test site, so I clicked the upload icon in the bottom left corner and selected upload file.
• I browsed to my html and css files, selected them and clicked upload.
• My test site is now accessible at shannonkay.infinityfreeapp.com.

Testing PHP Support

• This host supports php, so I'm going to try testing it with my guestbook.
• Still in the File Manager, I created a guestbook folder by clicking the + New File/Folder icon at the bottom, selecting New Folder, and typing in guestbook, then clicking OK.
• I opened the guestbook folder and uploaded the files for my guestbook. I need to give one of the files permissions. I right-clicked on it and selecting CHMOD, but there's no response. I wondered if free accounts can't change file permissions, but there's nothing about that listed on the website. I felt like the web client might be the problem, so I connected with a desktop ftp client(cyberduck), and was able to CHMOD the file to 666.
• shannonkay.infinityfreeapp.com/guestbook is now working, and I made a successful test guestbook signature.
• I started to test the custom domain support, but it doesn't allow adding a subdomain as a custom domain. Since I don't want to devote a base domain to this test, I stopped there. Other than that, it was going fine, and I'm confident that people will be able to use their domains at this host. They have documentation about custom domains here.

Leilukin is the one who encouraged me to give InfinityFree another chance, and shared some additional feedback at 32-bit cafe.

Being a free web host, InfinityFree has its own limitations, mainly by implementing their own security measures on websites on their free hosting plan to ensure only regular browsers can access these websites. The most notable drawback from this security measure is that it blocks feed readers from being able to read RSS feeds from websites hosted on InfinityFree, even if the website owner decides to provide an RSS feed.

However, given the lack of options for free web hosts that support PHP, I would still recommend it to PHP beginners.

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