I would like to download my .htdocs file, but i’m unable to. The connect is so slow that it appears it will take around 2 days to download the 250mb directory. I’m using filezilla and it’s taking forever. I SHOULD be able to go to cPanel and just download the direction, but when I do the page just refreshes and times out. I suppose this is a way for Infinity Free to force people to pay for their ‘premium’ service so that they can get support, and backups enabled. When i tried to back up my wordpress site using a WP back up plugin it didn’t work either. It just stalls during backup. No error or anything, it just stops.
What I would like is for infinity free to allow for backups, and to download backups. But the settings for that are turned off to prevent people from migrating their websites to other services.
Well, I certainly will migrate to another provider even if it means building the website from scratch again, as infinity free has about 70% uptime and is incredibly slow when it is up. Free hosting, I should have known it would be rubbish.
here’s the official guide for backing up your site:
The recent change (by IFastNet The company who provide the infrastructure that Infinity Free is built on) that limits the number of simultaneous connections to 3 is likely part of this.
Unfortunately that’s not an option. IFastNet didn’t add that to the control panel. Nothing Admin can do about that.
Infinity Free don’t offer a premium service. The Premium Hosting is a product provided by IFastNet. Infinity free get a small referral payment if you upgrade, but its not an Infinity Free product
A lot of wordpress backup plugins fall victim to the file size limit. Hence the recommendations in the guide above.
Backups are aloud, just not automatic. Remember this is a free service, and implimenting a tool like a backup downloader takes time and money.
Its not that the settings are turned off. They are simply not there. Remember that the control panel here isn’t the popular (and expensive) CPanel, its a separate tool that IFastNet use that looks very similar.
Personally, my sites all have about a 98% up time. Response speed will depend more on your local internet and where you are in the world. IFastNet and their servers are based in the UK. So if youre in the UK, or most of Europe, its really fast. If you’re in, for example Russia the fact that you are physically a long way away from the server, along with the data changing between infrastructures multiple times, its going to take longer.
In my experience, its one of the best free hosting options around, and I’ve tried lots. There’s this forum for support (very active), Its got good uptime and for most of the world, pretty good throughput.
Is it perfect? No. But it is FREE. You’ll always get a better service if you’re paying for it. That’s just life.
There is no backup option we can just enable. It’s a custom panel, so if you don’t see a feature, that usually means the feature just doesn’t exist.
Making backups of a full website is not so straight forward, it’s quite a taxing operation.
The file manager can do it for small to medium sized folders. For big backups, using FileZilla is recommended.
Yes, downloading everything over FTP may take some time, especially if you’re far away from our servers. That’s just how FTP works I’m afraid, and I recommend just starting the transfer and leave it running in the background while you do something else.
The Filestash file manager also tends to be pretty good at downloading entire directories. We have an installation you can use here (you can login with your hosting account username and password): https://filestash.infinityfree.com
There is a very good reason why we don’t recommend using backup plugins. Just don’t go and blame us for someone else’s software malfunctioning.
Yeah, I tried downloading via FTP. After it ran for about 12 hours I realized it was going to take another 2 days, or likely longer as it was continuing to add files to the queue as it went along. Not worth it, I could just build a whole new website in 2 days.
“Don’t exist” is the same as being turned off. They’re purposefully using a limited administration panel precisely to limit the activities of their non-premium user base.
Nope, sounds like I’m correct. “if you don’t see a feature, that usually means the feature just doesn’t exist.” Yes, if it doesn’t exist because your company is purposefully using a limited panel then your company is limiting otherwise common features.
The FTP download was looking like it was going to take 2-3 days to complete, running 24 hours a day. My understanding is that your servers are in the UK. I’m in central Europe. Should it really take days to download what appear to be a 350mb file?
It’s easy. I downloaded my database, but the FTP download was taking forever. It’s not a matter of any of this being difficult, it’s just a matter of slow servers.
I tried to use FileStash, the download ended after 1.3mb and gave me an error log. It says:
Very different. Turning something on is easy, developing something is hard. The end effect may be the same, but the situation couldn’t be much more different.
Do you know how much cPanel costs? $69.99 per month per 100 accounts. IFastNet arnt going to drop that kind of money on free hosting. And neither is infinity free.
The choice to use vistapanel was made by IFastNet, likely due to cost.
But complaining at people here, because you don’t like decisions made by IFastNet and the vistapanel Devs won’t change anything.
Plus, even if vistapanel had a backup option, the download speed wouldn’t be affected. That’s entirely down to the connection speed between you and the UK servers
$70 per server per month is peanuts on the amount of money that free hosting is costing us. What is absolutely wrecking the numbers is the $0.49 per account per month after those 100 accounts.
I think the current cost for a single free hosting account is in the ballpark of $0.01 per account per month. Which might seem tiny, but upgrade ratios are very low. So even that’s costing a lot of money in the grand scheme of things.
And that’s before you consider that cPanel generally just breaks down if you try loading more than a few thousand accounts on it. We need to achieve a much higher account density in order to keep the costs that low.
So using a custom control panel is not an option, it’s a requirement. You simply cannot provide free hosting on the scale that we do with commercially available control panel. Your only option is to design a custom hosting platform, which means you’ll inevitably need to make your own control panel to manage that custom platform.
It shouldn’t take that long if you’re in Europe. Latency should be low enough that transfers are pretty fast.
To test it, I tried to backup your entire website over FTP. I’m in the Netherlands, testing it using a regular residential internet connection. Downloading everything took 45 minutes. If you’re further away, it might take a bit longer, but not multiple days.
But you also need to understand how FTP transfers work. When I tested it, the FTP download queue in FileZilla was empty most of the time while downloading. Why? Because you don’t just have 350 MB of data, but also almost 40,000 files and folders. Traversing your account to build the list of files to transfer and then setting up all those transfers is what’s making this whole process so slow. And that’s what makes the average download speed so low. Not because the transfer speed from the server is so low, it’s because finding and enqueuing all those small files takes so much time.
However, a quick look at your login history shows me that you’ve been using various VPN serves or proxies, with connections coming from various areas in the US. If you are indeed in central Europe, then sending your data for a round-trip to California and back is going to absolutely wreck your speeds.
You may want to try connecting without a VPN and see if that helps performance.
I know $70 itself isn’t much, I was pointing how quickly it would add up. Part of my job I do cost benefit analysis, and we have to consider the impact £0.01 per customer has on the business overall, so I dont discount any cost no matter how small. When you have hundreds of thousands to millions of customers even the tiniest costs add up fast
Thank you for just reiterating my point even in your attempt to rebut it. It “doesn’t exist” because iFastNet doesn’t want to spend the money on the feature for free users, so in essence they’ve ‘turned it off’ for free users. The option IS available, as you’ve implicitly admitted, and it’s available to premium users. But it’s been ‘turned’ off by iFastNet due to cost.
So, I was correct in my original post. The option isn’t available in order to encourage free users to upgrade to the premium accounts. I get it, it’s just business, I understand. However, its a shame for a user who just wants his data back so I can move it elsewhere.
I’m now building my website all over again on another host. Blazing fast, best price in the industry for fully managed specked out wordpress hosting. 5 Websites for $9.50 a month. And it crazy fast.
Well, yes and now. The “download” button exists in the file manager, but it doesn’t actually work unfortunately. The page reloads and throws an error every time.
It would probably be more accurate to say its not available because its not economic for IFastNet to use cPannel for free accounts. But I’m not going to argue that point any further. End of the day, its not a function that is available.
I’m pleased you found a host that meets your needs I’d like to wish you the best of luck with your site
There is a very distinct difference between “disabling” something and “never having had it in the first place”.
Also, I want to remind you that this is a free service. And I don’t mean that as a “you should be grateful for what we give you” way (you should absolutely expect a usable service). But asking us to spend more money for you when you’re not spending any money on us seems a bit hypocritical don’t you think?
Not everything bad that happens to you is done by someone purposely to cause you grief. We’re not omitting a backup feature to force you to upgrade.
We don’t have a backup feature because backing up an entire website is hard, and puts substantial stress on the servers. Making it easy means people will use it a lot, and that will either reduce performance or increase cost, and neither is desirable.
On premium hosting, we’re willing to eat that cost, but the economics of free hosting simply make that impossible.
If you were willing to spend $10 per month on hosting in the first place, I would have told you right from the start to ignore the free hosting. Most premium hosting is better than most free hosting.
If you’re happy with your new host, then I wish you best of luck. But I’m sure that you would have been happy here too had you picked the right plan for your needs to begin with.
I’d like to wish you the best of luck with your site