So you got your completely free hosting account, Great! So now you’re wondering, what can (and can’t) you do with your new hosting account?
What can I do with my free hosting account?
You now have a website hosting account with PHP and MySQL, so now you can create your website!
What kind of website you may ask? The options are too many to list! You can create a blog, forum, online store, portfolio site, landing page, personal home page or almost any other type of website you can think of.
And (this is a frequently asked question), you are allowed to place your own advertisements on your website.
What can’t I do with my free hosting account?
In order to protect you, your website, our systems, other users and ourselves, there are some restrictions on what you can do with your free hosting account.
Host things which are not websites
Please note that InfinityFree provides a website hosting service. That means that the content on your hosting account should be designed to produce websites which are accessed through browsers.
Here are some examples (not an exhaustive list) of things which you’re not allowed to host:
- Data hosting, database hosting, API hosting. There are special database hosting services for mobile/desktop apps and games which work much better than website hosting for this.
- File storage, backup and sharing. Our servers are optimized for website files, not storing and sharing large files. File hosting services like Dropbox, Mega, Backblaze or Amazon S3 are much better suited for this.
Features of free website hosting
There are simply some features which free hosting doesn’t offer. If your project needs a programming language, database feature or other function which we don’t offer, you may not be able to host that project with us. If you lack one such feature, you may also want to check if this feature is included with premium hosting.
Additionally, please remember that InfinityFree is a website hosting services. That means that our hosting is intended to be used to host websites: visual pages to be accessed through web browsers. In order to help enforce this, we run a security system which ensures that only normal web browsers can access your website.
Rules regarding website content
The following is a summary of our Terms of Service. Please note that this article is NOT a legal document. For more detail about the rules, please read the terms directly. We tried to make the terms of service easy to read and understand for everyone, and highly encourage you to read it. In case of contradictions between this article and the terms, the Terms of Service takes precedence.
Our terms of service can be summarized to two key points:
- You cannot do anything illegal.
- You cannot overload our servers.
You cannot do anything illegal
This means that any content and activities that would be prohibited in the laws of most countries cannot be hosted with us. Some examples of this are copyright infringement (piracy) and fraud. iFastNet and their servers are in the United Kingdom, and InfinityFree is in the Netherlands, so the laws of these countries are used as a baseline. But common sense goes a long way with this point.
Note that we say “you cannot do anything illegal” and not “you cannot host anything illegal”. We also cannot host websites which support or promote illegal activities. So if you have a website about sharing links to pirated content or provide instructions on how to setup scam sites, those are not allowed either.
Finally, we have also banned categories of sites which are not illegal per sé, but we know are high risk so we had to ban them entirely. Examples of this include adult content and crypto currency sites.
You cannot overload our servers
This means you cannot host website types which take a lot of server power and/or space to host, or simply use too much of it due to other reasons.
In order to keep the costs of free hosting low enough to offer it for free, free hosting has limits on processing power, memory, hits and other metrics. These limits help to make sure that a few high traffic sites cannot slow down or even bring down the our systems. This way, we can offer a fast and reliable hosting service to as many people as possible. If your website is hitting these limits, please consider switching to premium hosting, where the limits are much higher than on free hosting.
Also, some types of usage are banned entirely because they inherently use too much server power or space.
Chat scripts are not allowed on our hosting. Most (PHP) chat scripts work by constantly asking the server for new messages, which requires a lot of code to be executed, even if there is nothing new to see. These kinds of script generate very high server loads, which would harm other websites. There are technologies which allow for more efficient chat software (like Websockets), but these are not available on free hosting.
Note that this only goes for chat scripts hosted and run on free hosting. You are free to link to or embed externally hosted chat services.
File hosting sites of any kind (file sharing, media hosting, content distribution, backups storage) are not allowed on InfinityFree either. InfinityFree’s servers are optimized to handle web pages, not store and distribute large files cheaply and quickly. If you are looking for a free file hosting service, please use a service optimized for file hosting, like Google Drive or Mega. Those companies provide great services which are much more suitable for file hosting than our services.