# Free vs paid hosting: an honest comparison > Written by a company that gives hosting away: what free actually costs you, and the four signs it is time to pay for hosting. Source: https://cwp.sg/compare/free-vs-paid-hosting/ Author: Ben Johnson Last verified: 2026-09-21 **In short:** - Free hosting has hard ceilings on storage, processes, and traffic that paid hosting does not. - Choose paid hosting if your site earns money, sends email, or cannot afford to be down. - Free hosting works well for portfolio, learning, prototypes, or class projects with no revenue or uptime risk. - Use the [hosting calculator](/tools/hosting-calculator/) to see which tier fits your needs. We run the free shared hosting at CWP.sg. This page compares free hosting, including ours, to paid hosting. We are not neutral — we want you to trust us enough to stay if free fits, and to leave if it does not. Free hosting works well for some things. It fails badly for others. The decision is not about quality. It is about what your site needs to do. ## What free hosting actually gives you Free hosting is a shared server with hard ceilings. On CWP free hosting, those ceilings are: - 1 GB storage, but the real limit is 30,000 files (inodes) - 10 concurrent PHP processes - 50,000 requests per day, resetting at midnight UTC - 25% of one CPU core and 256 MB memory per account - 400 MySQL databases with 5 concurrent connections You get PHP with multiple versions, Softaculous one-click installs, FTP over TLS, a web file manager, and free automatic SSL on both the free subdomain and custom domains. Read the full breakdown at [what free hosting is](/guides/how-to-host-a-website/free/). You do not get outbound email (SMTP is blocked), cron jobs, SSH, Node, Python, Ruby, Go, backups of any kind, or an uptime guarantee. Accounts with no login and no traffic for 45 days are deleted, with email warnings at 30, 40 and 44 days. Three accounts per person maximum. ## The honest comparison with paid hosting | Feature | Free hosting | Paid hosting (typical) | |---|---|---| | Uptime commitment | None | Contractual, usually with credit | | Backups | No backups | Daily or weekly, often self-service | | Outbound email | Blocked | Available, limits vary | | Support | Community threads, no queue | Ticketed, response times stated | | Resource ceilings | Hard, low, shared | Higher, or dedicated, or auto-scaled | | Account lifetime | Deleted after 45 days idle | Persistent until cancelled | The key difference is accountability. A paid host loses money when you are down. A free host loses nothing. That is not a criticism — it is the economics. ## Four clear signs you should pay ### 1. The site earns money If even one dollar of revenue or reputation depends on your site being up, free hosting is a risk you should not take. An ecommerce shop, a client portfolio you bill for, or a landing page that collects leads — all justify the cost of paid hosting. ### 2. You must send email from the server Free hosting blocks SMTP outbound. You cannot send password resets, order confirmations, contact form responses, or any automated mail. You can use a third-party email service such as SendGrid or Mailgun, but that itself often costs money. If you need the server to send mail directly, you need paid hosting. ### 3. Downtime costs you A personal blog being down for an afternoon is annoying. A ticketing system, a membership site, or an API endpoint being down costs real money. Free hosting has no uptime promise. If you calculate what an hour of downtime costs you and the number is above zero, pay. ### 4. You keep hitting the process limit The 508 error page is the ceiling you feel first. You can reduce it by enabling PHP caching — page cache, opcode cache, object cache — and by not running heavy plugins or polling scripts. Read [the ceiling in practice](/errors/508-resource-limit-is-reached/) for the details. If you have done all that and still hit the wall, your site needs more resources than free hosting provides. That is normal. Migrate. ## When free is genuinely right Free hosting is the right answer for: - **Portfolios.** A static or nearly-static site showing your work. Low traffic, no email, no money at stake. - **Learning.** You are teaching yourself PHP, WordPress, or Laravel. Break things. Experiment. No cost to restart. - **Prototypes.** A proof of concept for an idea, a client demo that is not live, or an internal tool that can be down. - **Class projects.** A site that must exist for one semester and does not need to exist after. None of these things need an uptime promise, outbound email, or support response times. They need a place to run that costs nothing. ## The hosting calculator helps you decide The hosting calculator takes your expected traffic, your tech stack, and your must-have features and tells you which tier fits. It is the fastest way to stop guessing. Try it at [answering it for your case](/tools/hosting-calculator/). We wrote a full page on [our incentives, in full](/about/). The short version: we do not sell paid hosting. There is no upsell. If you need paid hosting, we will tell you so, and you should go find a paid host that matches your requirements. Free hosting is not a trap. It is a tool. Use it for what it is good at. Pay when the job demands it. That is the honest comparison. --- Content Website Platform (cwp.sg) operates the free hosting it writes about; see https://cwp.sg/about/ for the methodology and the commercial disclosure.