Questions re: free hosting plan - before making the switch

[onlineABC]

I like to know whether using forms (FormMail) which get forwarded to an email, are supported with the free infinity hosting plan?

Had some shocks with another free hosting company, where after I made the switch, set it all up,
with DNS pointing to their server and the outage of my website during that time etc.
just to then find out that email sending, nor SMTP (they offered emails), nor any kind of forms which by hitting submit would get forwarded to an email address, were supported.
So I like to make sure that I am not making another switch and end up with another shock at infinity free hosting.

Please advise.

Also, if there are any other limitations in the free plan, that I haven’t mentioned here, but that usually would be available in
hosting plans, please mention those as well, so I am aware of what exactly it is one will get with the hosting plan.

Naturally I read through the details of the infinity free hosting features.
But again with that other free hosting company, the features appeared fine, and the restrictions, were not mentioned anywhere,
and I only found out, after my domain was with them already, and then not working 100%.

Have now noticed then when clicking on register now, a new list of features gets displayed.
And I read on there that no emails are included. However that wouldn’t be a problem, if one could still forward submitted forms to another email account, outside of infinityfree — so would that be possible?
And I read that one wouldn’t have access to CPanel, but I assume there must be some kind of online way to ‘sort’ one’s account, even if without CPanel, – correct?

Hope you can help.
Thank you for your reply.

[Greenreader9]

Free hosting does not support custom email addresses, or the PHP mail() function. However you are free to setup custom email with a 3rd party service, and you are free to use SMTP to send emails from your website.

I’m not sure how FormMail works, I can’t find any documentation, but it looks like they handle the emailing so I don’t see it being a problem.

@onlineABC

Also, if there are any other limitations in the free plan, that I haven’t mentioned here, but that usually would be available in
hosting plans

I’m not really sure what you mean by this. It’s free hosting, there are plenty of restrictions, but most are not deal breakers for most websites.

I also don’t know what you consider a “usual hosting plan”, as there are plenty of different types of hosting plans. If you have a specific question you can help you out, otherwise you are more then welcome to read other forum posts, pretty much every limitation of the platform has been discussed in some matter here.

@onlineABC

if one could still forward submitted forms to another email account, outside of infinityfree — so would that be possible?

Nobody can answer that question without more information. Specifically how do you plan to send the email?

@onlineABC

And I read that one wouldn’t have access to CPanel, but I assume there must be some kind of online way to ‘sort’ one’s account

Don’t know what you mean by ‘sort’ an account. Since you’ve already created an account to post here, just create a hosting account. It does not take more then 5 minutes to get access to the control panel, then you can find out everything you want to know there.

[onlineABC]

Hi there Greenreader9,

Thanks for your reply.

My apologies for not being clear enough, with my questions

The main issue for me is being able to use forms with FormMail
(as I have got them all set up & I have quite a few that I need).

I guess it probably comes down to the individual case for each person,
so I was trying to ‘test’ it out after your reply. Wasn’t aware that was an option.

However, very strangely I amended a form to add a 3rd party email,
but I am getting the same server error like with the other hosting company.
So email sending of the form’s content to a third party email address, doesn’t seem to be supported then after all.

Which for me is not good news, not entirely sure, what I’ll do then.

Not aware of using SMTP on my website, I only know it for receiving emails.

(Like with other hosting companies, where one gets an email address, say it is [email protected], I only know of setting the SMTP up
say in Thunderbird to receive emails sent to that email address. Naturally that wouldn’t be an option here, as one doesn’t get an email address.
But as you mention one can use SMTP to send emails from the website, though this is new to me, then that wouldn’t be issue, I suppose.)

So perhaps(?) I need to set up SMTP to send emails from the web page (whatever that would mean?), to get the form’s content to be emailed from the website to a 3rd party email?

But I also saw now, like you mentioned that there is a control panel, just not CPanel, but that’s not a problem.

I also read that Full DNS Management is not included in the free plan.
But what does that entail exactly? As setting up the DNS for a domain to point to infinityfree is still possible.

And as Unlimited Hits are not supported, how many hits can one have on a site?

Sorry for any confusion. Perhaps you still have some answers, which would be helpful, thanks.

[Greenreader9]

@onlineABC

SMTP up
say in Thunderbird to receive emails

Are you sure? Because SMTP is used for sending email, not receiving it with a mail client.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/email-security/what-is-smtp/

@onlineABC

but I am getting the same server error

What error? Just saying “I got an error” is not helpful.

@onlineABC

But what does that entail exactly?

Exactly what it says. Free hosting comes with limited DNS management if you are using free hosting namservers / free subdomain.

@onlineABC

And as Unlimited Hits are not supported, how many hits can one have on a site?

You can search the forum for some of these

What does the hits limit mean

One of the limits InfinityFree enforces is the “hits” limit. This article explains what a hit is, how you can control your hits usage and what happens if you exceed the limit. What is a hit? A hit is a simply request to a file on your website, which can be a HTML or PHP page, an image, a CSS file or something else. A hit is not the same as a page view, visit or visitor. Visitor can visit your website multiple times, a visit can include multiple page views, and a single page view can include mu…

[Frank419]

@onlineABC

if there are any other limitations in the free plan, that I haven’t mentioned here, but that usually would be available in
hosting plans

Assuming that the “usual hosting plan” is something that resembles the 2nd cheapest paid plan offered by the enormous hosting providers, you might miss those functions:

• No SSH access.
• No cron jobs.
• No non-browser client access. Read more.
• File size limited to 10MB at most. Some type of files have their own limits. Read more.
• 1 MySQL account only.
• No remote MySQL access.
• 1 FTP account only.
• No full DNS control as you already figured out. You only get CNAME and SPF records.
• No PHP mail() access.
• No email accounts.
• PHP 8.2 is the only version — there’s no PHP selector.
• PHP is the only scripting language — there’s no Node.js, Python, etc.
• No access to php.ini.
• No access to server access logs.

[Admin]

@onlineABC

However, very strangely I amended a form to add a 3rd party email,
but I am getting the same server error like with the other hosting company.
So email sending of the form’s content to a third party email address, doesn’t seem to be supported then after all.

The way you describe it, it seems like FormMail will not let you send email to external addresses. If that’s the case, it doesn’t matter where you host your website, if the email service you are using doesn’t provide the feature you need, you’re not going to be able to do it. Or at least not without switching to a different email solution.

@onlineABC

(Like with other hosting companies, where one gets an email address, say it is [email protected], I only know of setting the SMTP up
say in Thunderbird to receive emails sent to that email address. Naturally that wouldn’t be an option here, as one doesn’t get an email address.
But as you mention one can use SMTP to send emails from the website, though this is new to me, then that wouldn’t be issue, I suppose.)

So perhaps(?) I need to set up SMTP to send emails from the web page (whatever that would mean?), to get the form’s content to be emailed from the website to a 3rd party email?

Please note that SMTP is a protocol for sending email, not receiving. Receiving email in email clients is typically done with IMAP or POP3.

If you have an email account you could use that provides SMTP access, you can use it to send email from your website. Instead of using a hosted form processing solution (like what I assume this “FormMail” service provides), you could do all the form processing on your own site and send the email directly from your website using SMTP and PHPMailer.

@onlineABC

I also read that Full DNS Management is not included in the free plan.
But what does that entail exactly? As setting up the DNS for a domain to point to infinityfree is still possible.

If you just want to host your website with us, our nameservers will work just fine. However, if you want to integrate many other services with your domain, you may find you’re not able to set them up because we don’t provide the necessarily options to configured the required DNS records.

You can work around that by using a third party DNS hosting provider, but that’s more difficult to setup, so I recommend to stick to our nameservers until you know that there are actually features you’ll miss.

[onlineABC]

Thanks for the posts.

-to Frank419 = great info, that was really helpful.

-to Admin = yup, I am still working on the SMTP issue, testing various things.
Learned now that one needs to set up a project/secret etc. for the GMail API to use their SMTP first, and not simply add the GMail email to the form,
and I am still trying to get this done and also find out where exactly to add it into the form’s HTML then.

Here in the forum I only find the infinityfree contact form to use and haven’t found anything yet on FormMail forms.
Still working on it…

[onlineABC]

@Admin

If you have an email account you could use that provides SMTP access, you can use it to send email from your website. Instead of using a hosted form processing solution (like what I assume this “FormMail” service provides), you could do all the form processing on your own site and send the email directly from your website using SMTP and PHPMailer.

— And how would one do that? Haven’t found anything on this yet. I’d assume one would have to come up or know the exact HTML code for it all, which one doesn’t need when using the FormMail form.

[Greenreader9]

HTML is not a programming language. It really only defined the base of what appears on the screen. It cannot send email, communicate with APIs, etc. You need an actual programming language, like PHP, to do that.

@onlineABC

Learned now that one needs to set up a project/secret etc. for the GMail API to use their SMTP first

I don’t know what you are trying to do, but that’s just making it 10x more complicated. (I’m also pretty sure that’s using Google Cloud, not gMail).

Just use your existing google account, or create a new one just for this.

Gmail can be used as an SMTP client for a small amount of sends, just use the SMTP info below:

1. SMTP server address: smtp.gmail.com
2. Port: 587 (for TLS) or 465 (for SSL)
3. Authentication required: Yes
4. Username: Your full Gmail address (including @gmail.com)
5. Password: The app password you generate from “security” at myaccount.google.com

[Admin]

If you already have a working website with FormMail, then switching to PHPMailer is more work. But from what you’re saying, FormMail doesn’t work for you. And if FormMailer doesn’t work for you, I hope you can understand that we can’t make some third party service provide different features.

The nice thing about going to PHPMailer route is that, unlike with FormMail, it just uses SMTP, which means it can be used with basically any email provider. You’re not stuck with one particular form processing service.

But it does involve writing some custom HTML and PHP code, which might be a little bit more involved.

If you insist on using a managed form hosting service, you can try to look for a different one. i remember someone else recently using Web3Forms.