InfinityFree Review - Do We Recommend it?


Infinityfree logo

Bad

Not Recommended!

  • No Support
  • Slow page speed
  • Bad Uptime
  • Limited in every aspect

Instead of InfinityFree, we recommend Hostinger as an almost free hosting option. Read our review here:

We've defaulted into believing, "You get what you pay for." As far as hosting services go, that has been true till now.


Did InfinityFree ⁠— a free and "unlimited" hosting provider ⁠— change our perception? Is it a recommendable hosting provider? 


Well, that's what we are going to discuss in this facts-based InfinityFree review. 


For those who don't have time to read the whole review, here's the short answer:


If you are an individual looking to host a few text-content pages, InfinityFree is perhaps a good option, but for anything other than that? An absolute no! Instead, we would recommend Hostinger (₹79/month) if the budget is a problem.


Check out our Hostinger review to see why it is our #1 cheap hosting recommendation!


If you are interested more in detail why we don't recommend InfinityFree, keep on reading:

Overview

Our ratings

D- | 1.5/5

Average response time

~290 ms

Avg. response times in top-targeted countries

US: ~ 180 ms | India: ~350 ms

Uptime

97.78%

Support

Chat & email ticket

Site transfer

Free

Introductory Pricing

Free

Top features

Free hosting

Company Information

There’s not much information available out there, but from a look at Wayback Machine and this answer, we have the following information:

  • InfinityFree was founded in 2016.
  • The owner/founder, however, has been providing free hosting since 2011. It was started as a hobby project.
  • InfinityFree is sustainable despite being completely free because of its deal with iFastNet. I.e., it manages to provide free hosting by upselling iFastNet’s premium plans.

We will discuss about iFastNet in another review. As of now, let’s look at what InfinityFree has to offer.

InfinityFree Web Hosting

4 things InfinityFree is decent at


1. It’s free


InfinityFree is free. And that’s its primary selling point. Sure, it works on a freemium model, but the premium plans are technically under iFastNet.


If you want to host a few text-based pages with a negligible possibility of surpassing the ‘low-traffic’ barrier, feel free to sign up with InfinityFree. Some of the uses include a small portfolio website, a school/college project site, and a little personal blog.


However, if you want a serious website ⁠— for professional or personal use ⁠— “free” is something you should skip because ‘you get what you pay for’. 


If you want one for business, we are sure you can spend $3-$4 monthly for a good hosting like Hostinger or Bluehost. But, if you are an individual with a very tight budget, you should still skip the free hosting and go with Hostinger- a super cheap and significantly better alternative.


Overall, InfinityFree is free, and that’s its pro. Still, we will suggest skipping free hosting if you are serious about growing online.

 

2. You can use your domain


Like InfinityFree, there are numerous free hosting providers working on the same business model. For example, Hostinger’s 000webhost. Most likely, you won’t be able to use your own domain with them. That’s not the case with InfinityFree.


Most free providers will only let you host on a subdomain ⁠— e.g., examplename.000webhost.com. While InfinityFree offers a free subdomain hosting (with .epizy.com or .rf.gd extension), it also enables you to host your custom domain ⁠— e.g., examplename.com. 


This fact alone puts InfinityFree amongst the top free hosting providers in the business. Yet, that’s only one less limitation than typical free hosting.

3. No ads

Another “one less limitation” about InfinityFree is there won’t be any ads on your site if you host with it.


Many free hosting providers will monetize your website with ads to cover the costs or make a profit. InfinityFree doesn’t need to do that because it itself is an ad for iFastNet.


InfinityFree has been able to bring a significant number of customers to iFastNet. Meaning, it is an ROI-positive business decision. Therefore, monetizing the subscribers’ websites with ads might get (extra) short-term profit but will lose customers long-term.


Anyway, whatever their business plan may be ⁠— at the end, the customer is benefiting with the “no ad” policy, and that’s an advantage of choosing InfinityFree over other with-ad free hosting providers.

4. Free SSL


The heading says it all. With InfinityFree, you get a free SSL certificate to make your site work on https. However, don’t expect much encryption from this SSL. 


Side note: You can’t use any other SSL certificate on the free plan. They will ask a premium if you want to add third-party SSL.

5 horrible things about InfinityFree

InfinityFree has far fewer advantages (that too in the context of free hosting) than disadvantages. It sure does a few things better than most of the free providers in the business ⁠— however, it is way below the best cheap web hosting, Hostinger.


Here are a few disadvantages of choosing InfinityFree:

1. Bad uptime

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. To minimize the costs, free hosting providers ⁠— all of them ⁠— overcrowd the servers. 


This leads to frequent downtimes because at least a few of the sites will try to use more-than-the-server-has resources. FYI, if you are one of the users using even a little more resources, they will ban your site or ask you to upgrade.


In our experience with InfinityFree, server outages were pretty frequent. One month, we had 50+ outages. Overall, the uptime was 97.78%, which is horrible, considering at least 99.9% is a recommendation. Plus, InfinityFree promises 99.9% uptime ⁠— but what can we do if the promise isn’t fulfilled on a free plan? Ask for a refund?!


2. Bad response time

Again, no surprise at all. More usage of server resources also leads to poor server response time. 

InfinityFree’s server response time was one of the worst in our testing. The global average stood at approx. 290 ms, which is 50% slower than Google’s recommended 200 ms. Plus, in India, the response time was nearly 350 ms, which is one of the worst! In the US, response time of 180 ms is good, but considering under 50 ms from most of our 5 recommended hosting companies, it’s bad.


In laymen’s terms, if server response time is bad, people will leave your website even before it starts loading. From a marketing perspective, a slow response time leads to an increased bounce rate, which, in turn, affects your search engine ranking badly.


In short, InfinityFree’s bad response time can hurt your traffic goals, if any.

3. Bad page speed

InfinityFree’s page loading speed is among the slowest. Before revealing the results of our test, let’s have a look at how it translates into the real world.


Here are a few numbers that display the significance of good loading speed:

InfinityFree’s page loading speed is the slowest
  • As the page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%.
  • If from 1 second to 5 seconds, the bounce rate probability increases by 90%
  • The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time. (Portent, 2019)

All in all, website loading time impacts the bottom-line.


How will it be impacted if hosted on InfinityFree, you ask? Well, InfinityFree’s servers are the worst. In our test, it took more than 2 seconds to load a dummy text-based content, which is more than double the recommended one second. However, if compared to our recommended providers, InfinityFree was 4x slower.


Our recommendation, Hostinger, loaded the same page in about 600 ms. See the difference?

4. Limited in every aspect

We didn’t expect much from free hosting, but because InfinityFree has mentioned “unlimited space”  and “unlimited bandwidth”, our expectations were slightly higher. And we are disappointed.

  • Bandwidth: If your small-sized site reaches about a hundred visits a day, they will ban your account or ask to upgrade. The server goes down frequently if there are a few real-time visitors.
  • Storage: First of all, storage is definitely not unlimited. Secondly, it’s too slow ⁠— it feels like they are using a floppy disk. This is one of the reasons why it took more than two seconds to load a simple text page. 
  • Server resources: Though there’s no particular mention of the CPU or RAM used, we believe the hardware lacks both in quality and quantity. Simply uploading a few files on the server took way more time than usual ⁠— a 1 MB file took about two minutes.
  • Others: 

      • It does allow you to install WordPress, but we weren’t able to install many WordPress plugins. Also, you have to install them via FTP. 

      • Merely installing WordPress and adding a couple of pages showed a 50% usage warning.

You can read more such experiences by other customers- here.


Overall, it’s free for a reason. The reason being- it’s impossible to work on the free plan, which allows them to offer premium service and get what they wanted ⁠— money! See, we aren’t against asking for money or running a profitable business, but this way?!

5. No support

If you are opting for free hosting, chances are, your knowledge about hosting-related elements is finite. In that case, you will need good support.


With InfinityFree, there’s no proper support. The only way to get answers to your queries is via the InfinityFree community or Knowledgebase. The Knowledgebase is pretty good, to be honest. Most of the common questions are properly answered. As for the community forum, it can take days to get a decent answer to your query.  


There’s no live chat, email, or phone support ⁠— of course, we didn’t expect any one-on-one technical support. However, you can raise a ticket if your account is suspended.


All things considered, there’s not much to talk about InfinityFree’s support ⁠— it’s bad and limited.

InfinityFree Hosting Plans & features

InfinityFree has only one plan ⁠— InfinityFree, which costs $0. However, there are two other plans mentioned under “Premium Hosting” on the official site: Super Premium at $3.99/month & Ultimate Premium at $6.90/month. Both the packages are of iFastNet, and on clicking the CTA button, you will be redirected to iFastNet’s official site.

InfinityFree Hosting Plans & features
  • InfinityFree is the plan we discussed about. It’s limited in every aspect despite being labeled as “Unlimited hosting”. It can’t handle a tiny amount of real-time traffic, the loading time is way too high, and the uptime is among the lowest. 
  • Super Premium and Ultimate Premium plans are iFastNet’s shared plans. Both come with comparatively more server resources and freebies. However, we wouldn’t recommend those either ⁠— If you have the budget to get the premium plans, you have a lot better options.

InfinityFree control panel

Considering everything, this part is suited in the “Pros” section. InfinityFree uses traditional cPanel. Many individuals actually prefer it. For us, it’s good from a functionality standpoint but lacks in UI/UX department.

InfinityFree control panel

You can manage your files, domains, etc. from here. Additionally, you can install scripts of your preferred CMS via Softaculous found in the panel.


Overall, cPanel gets the job done. And InfinityFree uses it.

Conclusion - Do we recommend Infinityfree?

Not at all!

From a “free hosting” viewpoint, InfinityFree’s offers are impressive ⁠— usage of a custom domain, free SSL, no ads, etc.


But...from a hosting standpoint, it’s terrible in all the essential features: uptime, response time, loading speed, real-time traffic confinements, and customer support.


The same will be the case with all the free hosting, as far as our experience goes. Therefore, we would rather suggest to spend a few bucks and get good hosting. Our recommendations: Hostinger at ₹79/month if budget is too limited. Or, any of these hosting providers if you can spend approx. $3-4/month.

  • Average response time - 180 ms
  • Uptime 99.97%
  • Free Site transfer
  • 24/7 live chat

Starts at ₹79 per month

Hostinger small logo

Starts From
₹79*
monthly

• Best uptime (99.99%)

• Fast, 0.4ms load time as average

• Good & quick customer support