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Finding a reliable and efficient web hosting service is often a big challenge. Amongst the many web hosting providers out there, GoogieHost has steadily gained recognition as a reliable provider when comparing the best free web hosting service providers on the market.
This review will discuss the performance, ease of use and pricing of Googiehost and to help you decide if it is the right web hosting provider for you.
Who is Googiehost?
Established in 2012, Googiehost is considered a veteran in the web hosting industry. Headquartered in India, the company is also among a handful that offer a free web hosting plan. Even more bizarre is that, unlike similar companies, it doesn’t offer its own premium hosting; instead, it earns money by selling affiliate links to other web hosts. The site’s homepage is basically a long list of web hosting coupons from other companies.
The Googiehost site is structured to look like a traditional web hosting company. However, the links that it displays are deceptive. For example, the “Paid Hosting” link leads to another coupon page for other hosting company plans, while the “VPS/Servers” link takes you to a blog section with articles about web hosting.
Essentially, Googiehost isn’t really a web hosting company, but an affiliate sales blog that uses free web hosting as a customer magnet. It even throws on a ton of intrusive, highly annoying ads everywhere to round out a somewhat nightmarish user experience.
GoogieHost features
Since we’re now aware that Googiehost isn’t a typical web hosting company, it offers a single free plan to attract users. With that plan, you get 1GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth, and email capabilities (provided you don’t need more than 1GB of space).
You also get free SSL, but that’s pretty normal today, and something that hosts have to offer to stay even the least bit competitive.
Compared to other free hosting companies, that’s pretty much par for the course. However, we recently updated another host, Infinity Free, which offers a free plan with a much better deal.
Googiehost’s free web hosting plan is indeed quite limited in resources, but it’s made more usable thanks to DirectAdmin for hosting management and Softaculous for one-click application installation.
Beyond that, however, things get a little edgy – but we’ll cover more on that in our next section.
Performance
Website reliability and speed are two of the most vital factors. Even if you’re using a free hosting plan for a simple, personal website, you’d at least want some level of consistency. That’s a keyword that seems sorely missing almost anywhere on Googiehost.
To begin with, signing up for an account on Googiehost was, to say the least, weird. Their site is in English, but once we clicked on the “sign up” link, everything converted to Italian. Attempting to change it back to English (via a dropdown menu) resulted in blank menus with no conversion options.
Looking past that, we filled in the user information form and submitted the application. Things were processed quickly, but when we checked the user profile in their system, they changed our country profile to India. Why? We have no idea.
Again, moving on, we tried to upload our standard test website to Googiehost. Uploading a 171MB backup file took about 20 minutes, following which the backup restoration promptly failed. We repeated the process three times, after which we gave up.
The following day, attempting to access the client control panel returned a 502 error, after which we decided to abandon further testing with Googiehost.
How easy is GoogieHost to use?
When it comes to ease of use, GoogieHost has taken steps to simplify website management by offering tools such as DirectAdmin and Softaculous. They even throw in free SSL, but seem to fail badly at configuring their own systems.
If you’re used to any web hosting control panel like cPanel or Plesk, DirectAdmin offers a similar experience, albeit one that doesn’t look as pretty. Softaculous also does a neat job of installing apps relatively quickly and efficiently. In that sense, Googiehost doesn’t lag behind the competition.
Unfortunately, the overall experience leaves one very confused due to the language changes, user data being auto-corrected for no reason, random system failures like the 502 we encountered, and a ton of ads being constantly thrown at you.
This makes it challenging to accept, even if it’s offered for free.
The competition
Bluehost, renowned for its user-friendly interface and versatile hosting options, is just one of GoogieHost’s competitors. Bluehost offers shared hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), and dedicated hosting, catering to a wide range of user needs. With a reputation for reliable customer support and an array of features, Bluehost presents a robust alternative.
Namecheap provides a significantly more professional and reliable foundation compared to Googiehost for any serious digital project. At the very least, you get a range of cheap hosting plans to choose from, alongside a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Even their domain names come with freebies like lifetime domain name privacy protection.
Hostinger offers a massive leap in performance and professional utility, essential for any growing site. Built on high-speed LiteSpeed servers and utilizing NVMe storage on higher tiers, Hostinger is much more reputable and reliable than Googiehost in almost all aspects. Plus, it offers dirt-cheap plans that aren’t far off from being free.
SiteGround, with its solid reputation for performance and security, stands as a fierce rival. Offering managed WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers, SiteGround’s focus on speed and technical excellence positions it as a contender for users seeking top-tier performance.
Liquid Web is in an entirely different league from Googiehost. If you want mission-critical stability and high-end performance. Liquid Web is one of the go-to hosts. Built on a robust infrastructure of dedicated and VPS solutions, these guys offer an industry-leading 100% Power and Network Uptime Guarantee.
Final verdict
GoogieHost is a very hard option for us to recommend. Since it doesn’t offer premium plans of its own, there’s no need to discuss that option here. If you’re looking for a cheap web hosting alternative, there are many notable brands around, like Namecheap and Hostinger. For high reliability and performance, consider SiteGround or LiquidWeb.
Even among free web hosting providers, most other options are far ahead of Googiehost. Here, we’d recommend Infinity Free, which does a much better job while also using free control panels and the like.
Remember, Googiehost isn’t really a web hosting company – it’s an affiliate sales site disguised as one. So don’t get carried away.
