Is free web hosting any good, or should you just pay?
Free hosting is fine for practice sites and projects nobody needs to find. For a site with a job, no: you sit on someone else's subdomain, there is no support to call, and nothing promises the service exists next year. Paid hosting starts at $1 a month in year one and $5.88 at renewal.
Free hosting is a sample. Someone still pays for the server, so the free tier is kept deliberately thin: a subdomain instead of your own address, capped resources, and support that is a forum rather than a person you can reach.
That is not always a problem. If you are learning WordPress, testing a theme, or building something nobody needs to find, free is exactly right. Nothing about the exercise depends on uptime, speed, or the address staying yours.
It breaks the moment the site has a job. An address you do not own cannot move with you, a free host that shuts down takes your site along, and there is no contract behind any of it. That is a lot of risk to save a few dollars a month.
So what does paid actually cost? Among the eight shared hosts we track monthly, the first year runs from $1 a month at IONOS to $5.99 at GoDaddy. All thirteen providers on our shortlist are paid; none of them sells a free tier.
Year two is the number that matters, and it is higher everywhere: from $5.88 a month at Namecheap to $17.99 at SiteGround. Counted properly, three years (one promo year plus two at the renewal rate) runs from $164.88 at Namecheap to $467.64 at SiteGround.
A note on the numbers: we record the advertised first-year and renewal price of each shared host once a month. The figures here are the August 2026 snapshot, and they move whenever the promotions do.
If the fear is wasting money, buy the guarantee instead of the free plan. DreamHost refunds shared hosting within 97 days and A2 Hosting advertises an anytime money-back guarantee; Hostinger, Namecheap, SiteGround and Bluehost each list 30 days. That is a real trial, on your own domain.
One honest exception: if free hosting is the difference between building something and building nothing, build. Just register your own domain from the start, so the address is yours, and move to paid hosting the day the site starts mattering to anyone but you.