Replacing Moonfruit with 000webhost.com

As I mentioned in my previous post,  my long time favorite free web builder Moonfruit.com decided to close it's free plan. I managed to save my two most important sites by upgrading to their paid version. I am exploring other options now to see if I can discover another  hidden gem in the world of free web site builders. Moonfruit's free plan had 3 main advantages. They had a nice click and drag builder that allowed me to start my site from a blank page and customize it just the way I wanted. Second great thing was ability to use my outside purchased domain name with their free plan. This is very rare to find, most builders like wix give you a free site but you can only use custom domain if you upgrade to a paid plan. Third , moonfruit had very limited branding on their free plans. Back when I opened my early accounts it was just a line in the footer . I had plenty of the old accounts to work with that it didn't bother me that later they switched to branding moon fruit logo in the header. This only affected newer accounts. 

My contract with Moonfruit (first year 50%) expires in August so my goal is to find a  different free host / builder that would have similar features as Moonfruit. 

I tested out wix.com and I really liked their builder but free plan is limited to wix.com subdomains (only paid plans let you integrate your custom domain), and they have pretty annoying branding which is standard on free plans.

Just recently I stumbled on a free hosting service (000.webhost.com) that looks promising . 

 000webhost has a decent web builder that allowed me to replicate my moonfruit site. It has less features then moonfruit's builder but for my needs it was perfectly sufficient . This host surprisingly lets you integrate your own custom domain and doesn't display annoying branding ads on your pages created with free plan. I have been testing this host for a few days and will be posting my reviews in more detail in the future. My main concern right now is how difficult it will be to maintain this free site. Free plans usually have a catch and I am waiting to see how bad this one will be. For example moonfruit free plan would delete your site if you don't log in the account at least once every 6 months. This was really easy to do so that never presented an obstacle for me. 000.webhost is not as easy to figure out. From some reviews online it seems like your site has to have at least 10 visits each month. If you get less then that then they cover your site with a banner that warns you that you will might lose your site soon. You can log in your account at that point and ask them to remove the banner but that reportedly  takes 7 days. Obviously this host requires their free users to be very active in watching their sites and making sure they don't become inactive. This is a lot more demanding than moonfruit . 

One good thing about 000.webhost is that you can back up your site and save the file on your PC. In case they label your accoutn inactive you can quickly restore your site in that account or open a totally different account and restore the site there and point your domain to the new site. Yes, this seems to be a major hassle comparing to moonfruit and potentially it could be a deal breaker for me.

Every account lets you create two web sites and point two custom domains. To open your account you just need an email adress. So I created one real site and one that I labeled inactive. I am going to test and see how long it takes for inactive site to be flagged due to inactivity. On the other site I will make sure that my real site gets 10 clicks every month . I want to test and see if these requirements to keep the free site are real and how strict they are enforced. As I sit and wait what happens with these two sites I plan to explore other free hosting plans. Hoping that by next post I should have better idea how reliable this free host is and how much work it takes to keep the free sites alive.