EnterraHost
Free hosting has a bad reputation, and most of it is earned. Plans that advertise unlimited space and then throttle you, sites covered in someone else's adverts, and an uptime record that nobody measured.
The idea is still sound. A small business site is a modest thing, and hosting it should not cost more than the business makes from it in a month. What matters is whether the free plan is honest about what it gives you.
What the eleven hundred megabyte business is
Our free plan, called Launch, allows 1 GB of website. That figure is smaller than most competitors publish, which is the first thing a careful reader notices.
The difference is what the number counts. On many plans the storage figure is shared with everything else the account does, so a mailbox full of years of attachments and thirty days of backups eat into the space the website was advertised as having. On ours, mailboxes are a separate service on separate infrastructure and backups are held apart from the site they protect.
The figure on our free plan measures the application, its files and its content. Nothing else competes for it. A small business site built sensibly, with compressed images, sits in the low hundreds of megabytes and has room to spare. The article on what a hosting storage limit actually measures walks through the two kinds of quota properly.
Where a free hosting plan earns its place
A brochure site for a service business is the classic case. A few pages, a contact form, an address and opening hours. It does not need a database cluster and it will not see a thousand visitors a day.
A side project that might become something is the second case. Building it on a paid plan before it has a single reader is spending money to find out whether an idea is worth spending money on.
A staging copy of a site you are rebuilding is the third. It needs to be reachable, it needs the same PHP version, and it needs to be disposable.
In each of these the plan is not a compromise you endure until you can afford better. It is the right size for what is being built.
What it will not carry
Launch gives you one website, one database and one FTP account, with 30 days of backups held separately from the site they protect. That is a real allowance for a brochure site, and a tight one for anything that grows.
Mail is not included on the free tier, and that is a deliberate separation rather than a limitation. Mail runs on its own infrastructure with a 99.9% uptime commitment, commercial anti-spam and anti-virus in front of every mailbox, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC already in place. None of that belongs in a website plan, and none of it competes with your website for space.
That last point matters more than it reads. Mailbox storage is separate from hosting storage. Ten 50 GB mailboxes do not cost you 500 GB of your hosting package, because they are not stored in it at all. Your 1 GB stays 1 GB of website. The business email page carries the price and the full feature list rather than this guide, so the figures you read there are the ones that apply.
An email address you already have will still work. A contact form on a free plan can deliver to any mailbox you own, including one with another provider.
The domain is the part that usually is not free
This is where the real cost sits on most free hosting, and it is worth being clear about it.
We will host your domain, and registering it is a separate order. A domain is a cost every year regardless of who hosts the site, so a plan that gives you hosting free and charges for the domain has not hidden anything. It has separated two things that were always two things.
The article on finding an available domain name covers the search and what the result tells you.
Knowing when you have outgrown it
Three signals, and they arrive in this order.
The website approaches the 1 GB limit. That is files and content, so it comes down to how much is being published rather than how many people are reading.
Mailboxes start to matter. A business that is sending invoices from a personal address eventually wants its own domain on the mail, which is the mailbox service rather than the website plan.
The site starts to do something dynamic. Orders, logins, customer accounts, a membership area. Launch carries one database, and a store or a membership site will want more room than that.
Moving up is a plan change on the same account, not a migration. Files stay where they are, and the domain does not move either.
What to check before you trust any free host
Ask two questions. What counts against the storage figure, and what happens when you reach it. A host that answers both plainly is telling you how it behaves under pressure, which is the only time the answer matters.
A host that will not answer them is telling you something too.
When you are ready to add mail to a free site, mailboxes go on your own domain with anti-spam and anti-virus in front of them, and the business email page carries the current price. The article on choosing between 10 GB and 50 GB is the honest starting point rather than the largest tier. The hosting plans page sets out what each tier includes, and the bundle builder lets you add a domain and mailboxes to a free site in one order when you are ready for them.