Agilityhoster.com Review - It's pretty decent free hosting

First off, I'll say that agilityhoster has a pretty clean account administration area for it's free hosting clients with most of the features you'd expect from inexpensive paid hosts.

They've got the file manager, something to click on so you can set up a MySQL database, and they even allow you to switch from PHP 4.X to PHP 5.X.

It looks like any blog or CMS should run on this free hosting service. And I noticed that they have one of those automated installers called "Zacky Tools" which I was hoping to use to install my CMS of choice, TYPO3. But after filling in the "Zacky Tools" form, I was confronted with a message stating, "You cannot use Zacky Tools Installer because your hosting plan does not include this feature!   UPGRADE NOW!"

Ok then. I just wish they would have told me that before I entered my site's configuration information.

So then, I'll just upload TYPO3 via FTP. That's what I started to do. But then I noticed that some files weren't being uploaded if they had unconventional file extentions. I'm not saying that's the reason, but that's what all of the failed transfers had in common.

Giving wordpress a try

Next, I gave wordpress a try on agilityhoster. I downloaded the wordpress install package from the wordpress site and then began to upload it to the server.

Wordpress is easy to install and runs on just about any server I tried. And if Wordpress runs ok on agilityhoster, then I'd say agilityhoster qualifies as a "decent" host.

Using FTP, I've noticed that agilityhoster get's kind of unreliable if more than 1 ftp transfer is happening at a time. I just adjusted filezilla's settings accordingly to comply with that. It looks like uploading Wordpress this way won't take all that long as Wordpress doesn't have that many files.

Other nice features

While I'm waiting for Wordpress to upload, I'll mention some other features of Agilityhoster.com

• If you don't have a domain, their free hosting package will give you 5 subdomains. Otherwise, you can use up to 2 domains with a free hosting account.
• From what I can tell, they seem to allow cron jobs which is a feature quite uncommon for free hosts to have
• Over 2900 perl modules are installed
• They maintain a list of software which is compatible with their hosting configuration which includes
  
  • Drupal
  • Joomla
  • Moodle
  • Nucleus CMS
  • Open-Realty
  • WebSiteBaker
  • phpWebSite
  • Geeklog
  • dotProject
  • PHProjekt
  • 4Images Gallery
  • Coppermine
  • PHP Nuke
  • phpBB
  • CubeCart
  • Crafty Syntax Live Help
  • osCommerce
  • Help Center Live
  • PHP Support Tickets
  • Support-Logic Helpdesk
  • Simple Machines Forum
  • YaBB SE

Oh, looks like Wordpress is finished uploading, so I'll (try to) give it an install...

And the verdict...

Well, Wordpress installed and without a hitch. There was no database weirdness whatsoever. I'm kind of disappointed that TYPO3 won't install on Agilityhoster's free services, but it looks like Agilityhoster.com provides a free web hosting service that most people could use to get almost any blogging or CMS software up and running without worry. I'll recommend giving Agilityhoster a try if you want an ad free service that doesn't have much wonkiness.