Subject: InfinityFree — hidden restrictions and user deception
I want to warn everyone considering InfinityFree.
At first glance it looks like a free hosting solution, but in reality it’s a shady setup:
On the free plan, websites are NOT indexed by search engines.
Yandex and Google receive a 403 Forbidden response instead of the actual page.
Users are never warned about this in advance.
People waste time configuring DNS, SSL, Cloudflare, and verification,
only to discover later that their site cannot appear in search results.
Server-level blocks (openresty) return fake error pages, hiding the real issue.
This is done silently, without any notification.
TXT records for site verification are unavailable on the free plan,
making proper integration with search engines impossible.
The end result: your project looks like it’s online, but in reality it’s cut off
from indexing. For an online store this is a disaster.
Conclusion: InfinityFree misleads users.
They promise free hosting but hide critical restrictions that make it useless
for real projects. In practice, this is deception and feels like fraud.
You can also search other free subdomains offered (and custom sites hosted) by IF and see it for yourself. IF sites are indexed by Google and others. If you did not appear in Yandex (yet) give it some time. Your site is quite new and it seems to be still under heavy development. For being so generic, you are lucky Google even considered adding your site. Search engines have their own way of doing things which is relevant or not to any particular query. And these things are not controlled by IF. For being a technical architect and doing SEO stuff, I’m sure you well aware of this.
Calling IF misleading and deceiving customers are just blatantly false. If there are specific issues you want to address, kindly post the exact error messages, better with screenshots, so those with enough experience can take look a look at it.
Again, being indexed is not something you can demand, not to IF and definitely not from Google.
Subject: InfinityFree — Yandex indexing blocked by server restrictions
Let’s be clear: this is not about “waiting for Yandex” or “new site development.”
It is a deliberate technical block applied by InfinityFree servers.
When YandexBot requests pages from a site hosted on InfinityFree (free plan),
the server responds with HTTP 403 Forbidden.
Example:
curl -A “YandexBot” https://yoursite.com
→ HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
At the same time, Googlebot receives HTTP 200 OK responses:
curl -A “Googlebot” https://yoursite.com
→ HTTP/1.1 200 OK
This behavior is reproducible and confirmed by Yandex Webmaster diagnostics.
It is not related to “algorithms” or “patience” — it is a server-level restriction.
InfinityFree does not warn users about this limitation in advance.
People waste time configuring DNS, SSL, Cloudflare, and verification,
only to discover later that Yandex indexing is impossible.
The block is implemented at the server level (openresty/Apache rules),
returning fake error pages and hiding the real issue.
This is controlled by InfinityFree, not by Yandex.
Conclusion: InfinityFree misleads users.
They promise free hosting, but silently block Yandex indexing.
For projects targeting Russian search traffic, this makes the service useless.
This is not about “algorithms” — it is about a hidden technical barrier.
I don’t know if times have changed and there are things I am missing. But you should focus more on building content and your brand. You will get the crawls and visitors in time. Focus on the people, your customers, not the machine.
Yes, we’re blocking Yandex. That’s because the crawlers from Yandex are very aggressive and their crawling was seriously deteriorating the service for everyone. And given that most websites we host don’t target a Russian language audience, blocking Yandex crawlers was an unfortunate but necessary decision.
We’re well aware that this is not good for websites with a Russian audience, and we don’t make decisions like this lightly.
But ultimately, we have to make a service that’s as good as possible for as many people as possible, while still being able to provide it for free. And that’s not the same as being the perfect service for everyone.
How much money did you pay us due to that issue? How much “not free” did this make our hosting?
If we’d add a warning for every case where someone said “you should have informed people about this ahead of time”, you’d have multi-page documents of bullet points of different details of our service which you’ll probably never run into.
And let’s be honest, nobody would actually read such a document in full.
It would also give the impression that we have a service that’s restricted to the point of being useless, which is definitely not the case. Our service is not suitable for every website and project, but that applies to every service in existence to some degree.
We do our best to try to give everyone the relevant information when they need it, but it’s often hard to know exactly what someone needs to know at any particular time. You should know this: it took until your 4th post about this until you went from making accusations about us misleading you to actually stating what the problem was.
If the Yandex block is a problem to you, then I understand, and I wish you best of luck with your new free hosting provider that doesn’t have such blocks.
