The 000webhost Alternative: Where To Go Now

You followed a tutorial that said to sign up at 000webhost, and the link dropped you on a Hostinger sales page with no signup form on it.

000webhost is gone. Hostinger closed it to new signups on 8 July 2024 and switched it off completely on 14 October 2024, so there is no account to create and nothing to log into.

That's the easy half. The harder half is that for seventeen years 000webhost was the default answer to one question: where do I get free hosting that runs PHP and gives me a MySQL database? That is not the same question as where do I put a website.

So the 000webhost alternative you want depends on one thing, and it is not price. It is whether your site ever ran code on the server.

If you are comparing hosts rather than rescuing a site, the full static hosting comparison covers the field. This post is narrower: you were sent to a platform that no longer exists.

000webhost Is Shut Down. The Tutorials Are Not

It shut down on 14 October 2024 and the hosted sites were deleted. Hostinger, which founded 000webhost in 2007 and owned it to the end, offered users a paid Hostinger plan or a backup download before the lights went out. Wikipedia's entry on Hostinger, 000webhost's owner

I checked the remains myself, most recently on 13 November 2026:

• 000webhost.com and www.000webhost.com both answer HTTP 301 and redirect to a Hostinger page. No dashboard, no signup behind it.
• app.000webhost.com, the old control panel, has no DNS record.
• 000webhostapp.com does not resolve either, at Cloudflare's resolver or Google's. That was the domain every free site sat on, so every yoursite.000webhostapp.com address died with it.

That last one is why old links break rather than redirect: the address has nowhere left to point.

None of this reached the tutorials. Two years on, a search for free PHP hosting still surfaces posts and videos walking you through a 000webhost signup, screenshots and all. They were accurate when they were made. If you are reading one, close it.

What 000webhost Was Actually Giving Away

It was free PHP hosting with a MySQL database and a control panel. That is a different product from free static hosting, and the distinction is the whole post.

For nothing you got a file manager, FTP, PHP, a MySQL database in phpMyAdmin, a free subdomain, and a one-click installer for things like WordPress. A shared-hosting account in miniature.

That is why it appeared in every beginner PHP tutorial written between 2010 and 2023. If a course needed somewhere to put a login form and a users table, 000webhost was the free box that held it. It is also why a drag-and-drop static host is not a drop-in replacement: static hosts do not run PHP, and no plan or setting changes that.

The 000webhost Alternative You Need Depends On One Question

Did your old site run code on the server, or was it just files? Open the folder you have and look. It takes about twenty seconds.

• Any file ending in .php. It ran server-side code, and a static host will not execute it.
• A wp-config.php file or a wp-content folder. That is WordPress.
• A .sql file, or a database you managed in phpMyAdmin. It stored data between visits.
• Only .html, .css, .js, images and fonts. It was static all along.

Here is what each finding means.

The third row catches more people than you would think. Plenty of old 000webhost accounts existed only because a template shipped with a sendmail.php, and that one file made the site "need PHP". It does not any more.

If You Need PHP And MySQL, InfinityFree Is The Closest Thing Left

InfinityFree is the nearest free like-for-like replacement for 000webhost, and it is where I would point a genuine PHP site today. Same shape of product, down to the control panel.

From its own pages, rechecked on 13 November 2026: 5 GB disk, unlimited bandwidth, PHP 8.4, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 11.4, 400 MySQL databases, free SSL, a Softaculous app installer, 50,000 daily hits, and no ads injected into your site.

Now the part a review will not tell you. Those are not the figures that bite.

Four things to know before you commit:

1. It is about 30,000 files or 5 GB, whichever comes first, and the file count usually arrives first. That figure comes from InfinityFree's forum, not its plan page, and the forum is full of threads from people who hit it with WordPress and a few plugins.
2. 10 MB is the hard cap on a single file and it cannot be raised. One video, one podcast episode, one fat PDF, and you are stuck.
3. A hit is not a page view. Every request to every file counts, so a page pulling in a stylesheet, six images and three scripts spends ten hits per visitor. 50,000 a day is generous for a brochure and tight for a gallery.
4. No email accounts and no automatic SSL on free. InfinityFree's own premium comparison lists email, automatic certificates and real cPanel as reasons to move to iFastNet, its paid partner, at $4.99 or $7.90 a month as of November 2026.

Those are trade-offs rather than traps, and InfinityFree has run for over a decade without ads on customer sites. If the file manager and phpMyAdmin are what you miss, that counts in its favour. If you wanted out of a control panel, keep reading.

Check one thing before you move old code anywhere: which PHP version it needs. Anything below 8.2 is end of life, 8.2 itself stops getting security fixes on 31 December 2026, and 8.4 and 8.5 are the branches in active support. the PHP project's own list of supported versions A 2018 tutorial's code may simply not run on a 2026 host.

If It Was Pages, Images And A Form, You Never Needed PHP

Then a static host is faster and has no control panel at all. You upload a folder and get a working HTTPS address. No PHP version to pick, no database to run, nothing on the server a plugin can expose.

what a static website actually is sorts it out if you cannot tell which half you are in. The short version: if every visitor sees the same page, it is static.

The thing people assume blocks this is the contact form, because on 000webhost the form posted to a PHP script. A form service such as Formspree, Web3Forms or Basin does that job now, so the script is not needed. You point the form's action at the address the service gives you, and each submission arrives by email.

Be clear on where this stops. If a .php file in your folder is doing real work, OxyPages is the wrong tool. There is no PHP and no database here at all, and that is a boundary rather than a plan you can upgrade past. Use InfinityFree, or pay for shared hosting.

If It Was A WordPress Install

WordPress needs PHP, a MySQL database and a disk it can write to, so it cannot live on a static host in any form. Three routes, in the order I would try them.

1. InfinityFree. PHP 8.4 and MySQL are there, and its own site advertises a Softaculous installer that puts WordPress up in a few clicks. Watch the file count, not the disk space.
2. WordPress.com's free plan. Checked on their pricing page on 13 November 2026: 1 GB storage, a wordpress.com subdomain, no custom domain, no plugins, and WordPress.com's own ads shown to your visitors. Personal removes the ads from $4 a month billed annually, or $9 month to month. WordPress.com's plan features page
3. Paid shared hosting. A few dollars a month with backups, and the right answer for a WordPress site anyone depends on.

One more option. If the site was really a brochure built in WordPress, exporting it to flat HTML ends the plugin updates and the login page for good. It's a real job, but it removes the most upkeep.

What To Do Next

Thirty minutes, start to finish.

1. Find your files. Hosted sites were deleted on 14 October 2024, so your own backup, an old laptop or a git repository is the only copy left.
2. Run the twenty-second test above. One .php file that matters means you need a PHP host.
3. If you need PHP, open an InfinityFree account and upload over FTP. Budget for the 30,000 file ceiling and the 10 MB per file cap from day one.
4. If you are static, drop everything into one folder, name the main page index.html and upload it. hosting a single HTML file is the version for one page.
5. Point your domain last, once the new site works on the host's own address. connecting a domain to a website covers the records.

If the test put you on the static side, start a free account, no card needed, and upload the folder. Free covers one personal, non-commercial site up to 25 MB. A business site needs a paid plan, from $5 a month. If you landed on the PHP side, InfinityFree is the free one and shared hosting is the one that won't surprise you.