Monday 9 March 2015

Free WordPress Hosting Review: Bytehost.com

Byethost.com is a so-called "free" WordPress host with all the frills. You get the MySQL database and the PHP necessary to run WordPress, a VistaPanel control panel, FTP, etc.

The list of frills sounds tempting indeed.  200 Gigs of bandwidth traffic a month. 5 Gigs of disk space. 50 addon domains, 50 parked domains & 50 sub domains, free 24/7 support, no ads and no popups.

You may think you've landed in dreamland with Byethost.com, but you may soon have a rude awakening. First, keep this name in mind: iFastnet. These are the people who seem to own the Byethost.com brand, and they are in business to sell hosting, and they do nothing but sell hosting.

A lesson learned the hard way from years of WordPress blogging and site-building in free locations is that the paid hosting industry in general relies on the "free" hosts to get them business. Whoever signs up for "free" hosting is in fact a "lead" to the paid hosting industry for a potential future customer... "future" meaning sometimes much sooner than later, depending on how hard-sell they are. Some, like iFastnet & Byethost.com can be brutal.

Many paid hosts literally use free WordPress hosting under a different name to attract people who are "qualified" as actually wanting or needing a web site.  In 2013, a free host called Xtreemhosting was used by an iFastnet reseller (Visiba) to "catch" users for a paid upgrade. A year later, Xtreemhosting was being used by a different paid host, iPage, for the same reason, to "catch" likely customers for paid hosting. Their tactic is to monitor inside the free host and when they see a new signup start to build their site, a little "chat" module pops up, and they may offer you a "1-month free trial" on your choice of any of their hosting formats. In the case of Xtreemhosting, the free host didn't work, there were all kinds of "errors" occurring, and when I put in a support ticket, that's when Visiba (an iFast reseller) showed up, offering me the typical 1-month iFastnet "free trial" in paid hosting.  Visiba in fact disclosed to me that the "errors" I experienced inside Xtreemhosting were caused by the fact that there were WordPress "modules" "missing" from the free host, so my site could never work properly!  There was no intention of fixing Xtreemhost!.  It was a fly-trap for paid hosting.

In other words, my point is that the paid hosts use free hosting to catch flies. And it makes perfect sense. Why advertise to the vast population of people who don't want a WordPress web site, when you can use a "free" host to lure in those who do, and then demand they pay you for an upgrade to paid, or a "guided transfer" to paid hosting.

That's what iFastnet does with Byethost.com. They use Byethost.com as "free" bait to lure in people for their paid "upgrade". I know this for a fact, as I have several times signed up for Bytehost's "free" hosting for several different types of WordPress web sites and have always been rapidly hit on for a paid upgrade.  By rapidly, I mean within a few days of signup and installation of my new basic WordPress blog.

Here is a detailed example of the Bytehost.com game plan and tactics, which I learned the hard way, from experience.

Within 24 hours of my setting up a basic 5-page WordPress web site in April of 2014, I began to receive very rude, very nasty threats in my email from Bytehost.com alleging I was abusing their disk space and bandwidth!  These were very wild accusations, as nobody even knew the site existed, it was only me who was logging in to work on it, and it took up less than 20 Megs of space. However, if you are a newbie, you can be caught off-guard and fall for the "accusation".

Bytehost.com threatened to delete my web site unless I upgraded to their paid hosting. They were so generous as to offer me a "free trial" of one month in their paid hosting, after which it would be a monthly fee off my PayPal or credit card (their minimum option) or pay the whole year in advance.

In response to their false accusation of "abuse", I print-screened the inside of my Bytehost.com control panel and emailed it to them, proving their accusations of space and bandwidth abuse by me were false.  Byethost.com then pretended to apologize, alleging there was something "wrong" with their automated system which had made a "mistake" in my case. (There was nothing wrong: they make the same "mistake" in every case! I know, I've tried it several times with a different name and email address. Byethost always attacks a new user of its "free" hosting soon after setup, claiming abuse and demanding payment.)

Bytehost.com also spies on you inside your control panel and WordPress dashboard, while you are working. I figured this out by installing a free WordPress plugin to monitor visitors accessing my blog. Bingo! I repeatedly found myself "alone" inside my dashboard when a second IP address would pop up, traceable to Byethost.com ... they were watching me!  They were sizing me up!  Checking my blog to see if I was worth money to them as a paid-hosting candidate.

Luckily, I had learned my lesson with former "free" and paid hosts, I always export my XML (contents of the web site) using an exporter plugin after every edit session, sometimes 2-3 times a session. There are many exporter plugins. Some will export "contents" such as posts, pages, tags, and categories. If you want to export special menus and other additions you have made, you will need to find a special exporter. There are tons of free ones, unless you like to spend money for nothing.

You should always use a backup plugin as well. However, some free hosts are jealous: they don't want you to back up your work unless you pay them for an upgrade. Therefore, they will alter settings in their back-end to prevent your backup plugins from working. That happened to me last month. I had a small web site with minimal traffic in a free host (Freehosto.com), but it turned out also to be owned by iFastnet who seem to have inherited the free host and the domain name from a kid living in France when I had signed up. The kid in France either sold his interest in it, or abandoned it, or somehow lost control of the free host and the domain name. iFastnet now lists itself at Who.is as the sole owner going back a few years, but that listing is wrong; a kid in France owned it, I know, I did the research.

I had been backing my site up regularly without any problem. Suddenly, none of my backup plugins worked, and red-highlighted "errors" appeared, indicating the host had shut off backup capability somewhere in the back-end. I got lucky and found a great free plugin that took another route and backed up everything, about 50 Megs of files, and the databased, so that I could download them.  I got the download done, and also exported my XML (contents) shortly befire iFastnet shut my site down, without explanation.

In conclusion, Byethost.com, and many like it are not really "free" hosts, they are bait to lure prospects for paid hosting.

One thing I must say, and with regret -- because iFastnet is so nasty, I won't voluntarily deal with them -- is that the servers of Byethost and iFastnet are the fastest I have seen, and setting up my WordPress site on these servers was a breeze.  It's really too bad to see that they are so hard on their "free" clients, including shutting you down without warning when you, yourself, are not yet ready to move to paid hosting.

2 comments:

  1. WP-Land - $5 per month WordPress web hosting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Use this diet hack to drop 2 lb of fat in just 8 hours

    At least 160 000 women and men are losing weight with a simple and secret "liquid hack" to drop 2 lbs each and every night in their sleep.

    It is very easy and it works every time.

    Here's how you can do it yourself:

    1) Take a drinking glass and fill it up half glass

    2) Then follow this weight loss hack

    so you'll be 2 lbs skinnier in the morning!

    ReplyDelete