Free PHP hosting - do you really want it?

PHP hosting is hosting which allows webmasters to include PHP scripts in the body of the page. These scripts are then run on the server, usually to provide some sort of dynamic content for the page, often pulled from a database. For this reason, PHP is often offered along with one or more free mySQL databases.

If you are looking for free hosting which offers PHP to its customers, you probably want to run specific scripts, but have found that your current host does not support PHP, does not support the version of PHP that you need, or disables scripts at the first hint of CPU usage which might affect others on the server. Most hosting companies are very wary about allowing any script which has the potential to degrade the server performance. 

We had the experience several times of our host disabling a simple script which we ran once a week to reindex our site for our internal search engine.  They said it was taking too many of the system resources, even though it was only running for ten minutes a week. Their default response was just to delete it.

This leads to the main problem with scripting on free hosts – PHP is often offered by free hosting services, as part of an attempt to persuade people that their service is 'just as good' as a paid host.  But they may not have the physical resources on their servers to run many scripts at once, or have the support staff in place who can see what is a legitimate script and what may be a problem.  They err on the side of caution, and even though they claim to offer free php hosting, you may not get the chance to run your scripts consistently.

If you really need to run a PHP script for a legitimate reason, and want to avoid issues like this, perhaps you should be looking at a paid host.  You can now get a great host for about $5 a month.  (Most people can make this money back by putting a couple of Adsense blocks on their pages.) Good hosts will even help you with script installation too.