Prohosts.org Free web hosting Review

Prohosts.org has a pretty slick looking control panel. It's Vista Panel which is somewhat similar in looks to cPanel.

I'm pretty impressed that they allow me to have 3 MySQL databases. And they offer 350 MB of disk space quota. Their PHP version at the time of this review is 5.2.8 so you should be able to run most modern CMS & blogging systems.

After checking in to my control panel, It was time to get to work. It's time I will upload TYPO3's installation files to the server via FTP. I hoped their FTP wasn't slow, and that it allowed more than 1 simultaneous connection.

Before uploading, I created a subdomain. Prohosts.org offers users a variety of 9 domains for which to base a subdomain on. I chose the prohosts.org domain.

Apparently, like other free hosts, prohosts.org doesn't allow more than 1 ftp connection. That's not uncommon and it just means you'll have to wait longer to upload files. That's no problem, so I adjusted filezilla's settings accordingly.

While uploading my files through FTP I poked around the control panel and saw that Prohosts.org offers a fantastico like installer which means that anyone can set up Wordpress and other blogging software without having to upload anything, and with just a few clicks.

Also worth noting is that this free host provides basic email support. I mean basic because it seems like a user can't create email addresses and that the customer is restricted to a catch-all email account.

Still, email services is a feature that is not usually available on other free hosting services, so I'll count it as a plus. It's just that any email sent out will include the client's user name as the text before the "@" in the email address. 

I don't think many people (except for spammers) would need to the email services of this free host.

While uploading, I took a look at the PHP settings and here's a brief overview of them:

 After uploading my files, it was time to put the free host server to work

Uploading of my files occured without problems as long as I had Filezilla set to use no more than one transfer at a time.

Install was easy

Installing my content management system (TYPO3) was easy, but it was then that I noticed ads placed on the footers of every page of the install steps. I didn't find the ad placement intrusive; I just could have sworn that there was no mention of these ads when I signed up.

Once I logged in to TYPO3 though, I found that the ads are a problem. Visually, they're placed where they don't cause interference, but I suspect that something in the code used to autoplace the ads is conflicting with the functioning of the backend. I've ran into this problem before, and hopefully, prohosts allows for it's ad code to be removed from backend pages. Other hosts have allowed this.

To end this review, I will say that prohost.org has some pretty robust features, but the dealbreaker for me was the ads automatically placed on the backend of my web site and which rendered administration of my site unusable.

Perhaps with a different CMS, that wouldn't be the case, but for me I'll definitely say Prohosts.org is a no go.

Today I logged in to my Prohosts free web hosting account. Well, more specifically, I logged in to my TYPO3 CMS installation that resides on a Prohosts free web hosting account and I noticed something.

The ads that I mentioned previously were gone. 

So now the ads had disappeared, but I wonder whether they will ever reappear.

I'll tell you what though. I've learned that Prohosts is a reseller of Byethost's free hosting services. All of Byethost's resellers may at their discretion position adverts on their client's pages.

Basically what I've learned is not to use any Byethost's reseller's free hosting. Just go directly to Byethost.com if you want to scoop up some really decent free web hosting.

When you get free hosting direct from Byethost.com you won't get any ads on your pages, plus you'll get more features such as more disk space than you would from any Byethost reseller.