Will hosting with free webhosts (such as 000webhost) make a site less optimised?

I’d like to host a website which has the primary purpose of providing details of a small business (phone number, services, some photos etc.) - basically the normal small business website. Saving money is of course a priority, but SEO is also important.

Will hosting the website on a free webhost hurt the website’s ranking? The service of the host isn’t fantastic, so would a slightly longer loading time affect the ranking? Would the fact that it’s hosted with certain companies affect the ranking?

The short answer: yes.

The long answer:

How your site ranks in SEO depends on a lot of different factors, web hosting being one of them. Hosting on a free platform like ours can hurt your SEO, for example because of the free subdomain (unless you connect a custom domain) or the loading times. Whether or not you have SSL on your site will determine your ranking, too, so if you’re going to stick with the free platform I advise setting up with Cloudflare.

The other issue to be considered is that the free platform has problems frequently due to the sheer millions of users on it, plus it’s free so things take a while to get resolved sometimes. I highly recommend Hostinger’s premium plan, 000webhost folks get a special offer for upgrading and free site migration. I’ve been using them for years to host my personal website and projects, hardly ever any trouble. You should consider them if you’re going to be running a business website.

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