Feature Suggestions for the InfinityFree Free Plan

Informal
1

Hello InfinityFree Team,

I hope you’re doing well.

First of all, thank you for providing a free hosting service. It has given many students, beginners, and developers a chance to learn web development without having to spend money.

I’ve been using InfinityFree for quite some time. During that time I’ve built and hosted more than 20 websites across different domains. It has been a great place to test ideas, learn PHP and MySQL, and work on personal projects before moving to paid hosting.

More than anything, this platform has helped me learn. Because of InfinityFree I’ve improved my skills in PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, hosting, database management, and web development in general. I really appreciate having a place where I could experiment, make mistakes, fix them, and keep learning.

After using the free plan for a long time, I have a couple of suggestions that I think could make the experience even better while still keeping the service secure.

Suggestions

1. SMTP Support

Many websites today need email verification, password reset emails, and other basic email features. The lack of SMTP support makes it difficult to build a complete authentication system. Even a limited SMTP service or an officially recommended email solution would make a big difference for developers.

2. Official Recommendations for Free Services

It would be helpful if InfinityFree recommended a few trusted free services for things like email, storage, CAPTCHA, or similar features. Beginners often don’t know which services are reliable, so having official recommendations would save a lot of time and make it easier to build complete projects.

Why I Think This Matters

From my own experience of hosting more than 20 projects on InfinityFree, I can say the platform is excellent for learning and development. Most people using the free plan are students, hobbyists, or beginner developers who are building portfolios, testing ideas, or practising web development rather than running large commercial websites.

I believe adding a few carefully chosen features, especially some kind of email solution, would make the free plan even more useful while still keeping it sustainable.

Thank You

Finally, I just want to say thank you to everyone at InfinityFree. This platform has been a big part of my learning journey. Without it, I don’t think I would have been able to build so many projects or gain this much hands-on experience with web development.

Thank you for continuing to support the community by offering a free hosting service. I hope you’ll consider these suggestions in the future. I’d love to hear what you think.

Best regards,

Adnan Hassan Rabbi

2

That actually used to be a feature a long time ago. There used to be an entire email system (And I believe SMTP was included).

While it is a good idea in theory, it was abused A LOT by scammers and spammers, leading to horrible IP reputation that would send legitimate email to spam. Unfortunately the system had to be discontinued because there was no way to limit the abuse on the free system without taking on loads for more debt.

I think we could pretty easily come up with a community list of items and host it here on the forum. The harder part is making it easy for new users to find that list when they need it without annoying people who have been in the web hosting space for awhile. Open to suggestions!

6 Likes
3

@Greenreader9 , thanks for replying.

I totally understand why SMTP had to be removed. I used to use PHPMailer when it was available, but now I just use other options.

Also just a small suggestion, if needed you could even reduce the free disk space a bit. I don’t think everyone really needs that much.

One more thing, I made a project on one of the free domains before and one day it just disappeared. Maybe it was an issue or something idk, but if possible please check into that so active projects don’t suddenly go away.

Anyway thanks again for the reply and for keeping InfinityFree free :heart:

4

Oh i can use Email system on this website https://adnanhassanrabbi-rbbyte.kesug.com using PHPMailer

5

SMTP is supported, PHPMailer will work here. InfinityFree does not offer a SMTP service though, and PHP’s mail() function is disabled for the same reasons that a mail service is no longer provided.

For SMTP services, I recommend AWS (not for beginners) or Gmail, and others here have used Zoho.

4 Likes
6

Bro,I can’t create an Amazon account from Bangladesh because it’s not supported. I also don’t have a dual currency card.So Yeah

7

There’s also Gmail that you can use which is free

3 Likes
8

I can’t create an account because every time I try to sign up, it requires verification with a Bangladeshi phone number. Unfortunately, this service isn’t available in our country either. I also don’t have a dual-currency card, and due to financial limitations, I can’t afford to buy a virtual number. So I’m unable to complete the verification process.

9

You asked for recommendations and I gave them. If they don’t work for you, feel free to use something else. The services in my last post are what I recommend, I do not have enough experience with any other service to recommend them.

1 Like
10

use gmail, outlook, problem solved

11

If we would offer email, it would be vastly simpler to just open up Sendmail support, so everyone can just use PHP mail(). No configuration needed, and in some cases (notably WordPress) no external libraries needed too.

But email is not so easy to do in practice, it’s very attractive to spammers to abuse a free email service. Filtering spam and managing reputation is difficult to do yourself and costly to outsource. Right now, premium hosting uses Mailchannels and free hosting skips mail entirely.

So email would make the free plan more useful, but absolutely not more sustainable.

As for recommendations for external parties, the main issue is that by making the recommendation, we’re also committing to making sure it works well together. This depends on the availability and eligibility for their free plan, and compatibility with InfintiyFree services. You provided an excellent example yourself: Gmail is a popular option for SMTP but it’s not available to you.

Ideally we have an actual partnership with the target service so they know to expect an influx of InfinityFree users, and ideally promotion of upgrades too.

3 Likes
13

E-mail services would be too much to expect from a free hosting provider. Instead, InfinityFree could focus on improving its web hosting by offering features like Redis to help reduce server load. Redis is especially important for WordPress websites, where object caching can significantly improve performance and reduce server resource usage.

I’ve seen many websites get suspended because they exceed the server load limits, so adding Redis support could make a big difference.

2 Likes
14

Technically redis can be communicated over network but since InfinityFree is a reseller who cannot touch the infrastructure, the redis server must be connected over the Internet which is both slow and insecure. Not sure how that’s gonna benefit the websites hosted here.

15

Ignore the “InfintiyFree can’t do it anyway” messages. They’re not wrong, but just because I cannot implement it myself does not mean that it’s not a good feature suggestion or that it’s impossible to have it added.

But for Redis, I completely disagree with almost everything you wrote.

Email services are much cheaper and far more useful for free hosting than Redis ever could be.

Almost every website can make use of email. Even if it’s a simple landing page or a basic CMS that just needs to send password reset emails, they all would benefit from email. And replacing email with something else is not so straight forward.

Most websites don’t even support Redis. And if they do, then they can typically fall back to files or MySQL for cache, sessions, etc. All popular WordPress cache plugins work perfectly fine with file based storage.

Redis mainly becomes useful if you have a busy website with lots of traffic where file storage is not performant enough, you run into problems with concurrency or you need the cache to be available from multiple servers. None of these things apply to free hosting. Any websites that would benefit from Redis would run into other free hosting limits long before reaching that point.

And don’t forget that the point of Redis is that it’s an in-memory store. That means that every website using it permanently uses up system memory, even when the website is not actively being used. That’s a very significant cost on our side considering that websites on free hosting are all low-traffic sites.

So no, offering Redis would not reduce server load, it would substantially increase it, which mainly benefits an audience that doesn’t fit free hosting anyway, while being largely useeless for the majority of our user base.

3 Likes