After comparing multiple offerings I settled on 000webhost.com. They had site limiters and other restrictions on their free offering, but again, all I need was a basic place for my personal family to be able to read a few stories. They also allowed WordPress hosting for free, and I am pretty comfortable with WordPress, so it is my CMS of choice.
Everything went very well for multiple months. We (my family) all worked hard and got the content manually copied from Google's old static page system into the new WordPress system hosted by 000webhost. After the initial copy several months were spent adding new data, and fixing some of the formatting issues that occurred during migration.
During this time period I was creating backups once every couple of months, which is the only thing that ended up saving us.
One day I got an email from a family member saying that the site was telling her it had been deleted. I went to login and sure enough, my cPanel login was gone, the entire website was just gone.
I did a little research in the 000webhost KB system, and found an article that said because it was free hosting, if your site ever got deleted, too bad so sad, it was just gone. I could understand this, it was a free site, that policy made sense; I just didn't know why my site had been deleted.
After contacting 000webhost to see what had happened, I received a very polite email back saying that because I had not logged into the site in a long time, they had deleted it. I was a bit taken aback, we had been actively working on the site every week for months. With a bit more clarification I learned that in order for activity on the site to count, it had to be a login specifically to the cPanel system.
At this point I was finally irritated. It was a free hosting service so any policy they wanted to put in place was fine with me, as long as they were up front about it. And that was my problem, many other sites had been up front about having a policy like that, but 000webhost had not. It might be buried somewhere on their site, but at the time I signed up with them there was no warning that this would occur.
This is where the politeness ended from 00webhost, after expressing my displeasure that my site had been deleted with no warning, and no initial knowledge on my part, the response from them said I should have gotten a warning email, but it didn't always work; and they seemed rather excited to see me go.
Needless to say, I took my most recent backup and went to find another host. There's a decent chance we will start paying for a host eventually as the site grows, but I will never give 000webhost or their parent company hostinger.com my business after an experience like this.
