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Free Hosting Limits, Explained
Open Hostna
Free Hosting

Free Hosting Limits, Explained

Every limit of the Hostna free plan in plain numbers — 500 MB, 10 GB, one site, one database, one mailbox — and what actually happens when you reach one.

Open Hostna
  • 500 MBstorage
  • 10 GBtraffic a month
  • 1 / 1 / 1site · database · mailbox
  • €0at every limit
THE NUMBERS

What each limit means in practice

A limit is only honest if you can picture it. These are the plan's numbers translated into pages, images and visitors.

ResourceFree planWhat it means
Monthly cost€0No card, no trial clock, no fee that appears later.
Websites1 websiteOne site per account. It can be a subdomain we give you or a domain you own.
Storage500 MB NVMeFiles, database and mailbox together. Enough for a portfolio, a landing page, a small WordPress site.
Traffic10 GB / monthRoughly 5,000–10,000 page views of an ordinary site a month, depending on image weight.
Database1 MySQL databaseWith phpMyAdmin in the panel.
Email1 mailbox · 100 MBIMAP and SMTP for your own mail app. No webmail on the free plan.
HTTPSFree SSLA Let's Encrypt certificate, issued and renewed for the subdomain and for a domain you connect.
PHPPHP 8.5The default. 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 can be selected per site in the panel.
Control panelPleskThe same control panel the paid plans use, including the one-click WordPress installer.
AccessFTP / SFTP + file managerOne FTP account. No shell, no cron jobs, no root — that is what a VPS is for.
Server locationGermanyA Hetzner data centre in Germany. The company behind it is registered in Germany too.
Advertising on your siteNoneWe never place anything on your pages. Your visitors see your site.
ActivationBy a personEvery free account is checked and switched on by a human, not a script. You get an email when it is live.
SupportBest effortYou can open a ticket. Free plans are answered after paying customers, with no response-time promise.

500 MB of storage

Files, the database and the mailbox share it. A hand-written HTML site rarely passes 20 MB. A fresh WordPress install with one theme and a few plugins is about 100–150 MB, which leaves room for a few hundred normally sized photos. What eats it: uploading camera originals (4–8 MB each) instead of web-sized images, keeping old backups inside the site folder, and plugins that cache aggressively to disk.

10 GB of traffic a month

Traffic is everything the server sends out: pages, images, downloads, even the mail you fetch. A page of an ordinary site weighs 1–2 MB, so 10 GB is somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 page views a month. A page that ships a 20 MB video reaches the same ceiling after 500 views, which is why video belongs on a video platform, embedded.

One website, one database, one mailbox

One site means one address: either the hosted.hostna.com name you pick or a domain you connect, but not both serving different content. One MySQL database is what one WordPress, one small app or one PHP project needs. The mailbox holds 100 MB and works over IMAP and SMTP with any mail app; there is no webmail on the free plan.

AT THE EDGE

What happens when you reach a limit

There is no card on file, so nothing can be charged by itself — not at sign-up, not later, not when a limit is reached.

  • Storage full: uploads and new posts fail until you delete something or move up. Existing pages keep being served.
  • Traffic used up: the site is not cut off automatically. We look at accounts that stay above 10 GB and write to you.
  • Mailbox full: new mail bounces back to the sender until you delete or download messages.
  • Nothing is ever charged. There is no card, no invoice and no upgrade that happens on its own.

Going over a limit does not switch the site off by itself and never bills you. A site that stays above its limits gets an email from us asking you to trim it or move up; that is the whole consequence.

NOT ON THE PLAN

What the free plan leaves out on purpose

Each of these is a real cost or a real abuse vector. Leaving them out is what keeps the plan free of ads and free of a card.

  • Cron jobs and scheduled tasks — no scheduler on the free plan.
  • Shell access (SSH) and root — the panel, FTP and the file manager are the way in.
  • Automatic backups — you can make and download your own from the panel; there is no restore promise.
  • Webmail — the mailbox is IMAP/SMTP only.
  • A response-time promise on support and an availability target — both are paid-plan things, see the service levels.
  • Mass mailing — the mailbox is for a person's mail, and outgoing mail is rate-limited on every shared plan.
RULES

The three rules that are not numbers

  1. To order it you need an account with a confirmed email address, a telephone number and a full postal address. One free plan per person and per household; a second one under another email is closed when found (Terms, § 12).
  2. Activation is by a person. Every free account is switched on by a person, not a script. You get an email when it is live.
  3. Inactivity is not free storage. If nobody signs in to the client area for six months, an email goes to the address on file; if there is still no sign-in 30 days later, the site is removed. A sign-in resets the count — log in now and then, or download a copy if the project is finished.

The free plan is not offered in every country. If yours is not covered, the order flow says so before you finish — the paid plans may still be available.

Start free

BEFORE YOU ORDER

Questions about Free Hosting Limits, Explained

Is 500 MB enough for a WordPress site?

For a small one, yes. WordPress with a theme and a handful of plugins uses about 100–150 MB; the rest is for your images. Resize photos to web size before uploading and a few hundred of them fit. A photo portfolio with full-resolution originals will not.

How many visitors is 10 GB of traffic?

Between roughly 5,000 and 10,000 page views a month for an ordinary site whose pages weigh 1–2 MB. Heavy images or self-hosted video use it up much faster; embedded video from a video platform does not count against it at all.

Do you charge for overuse?

No. There is no card on file and no overage price. Going over a limit results in an email from us, not a bill.

Can I raise a single limit without upgrading?

No. The free plan is one fixed size. The first paid plan, Pro Hosting at €2.80 a month, raises all of them at once: 2 GB, 100 GB, two sites, more databases and mailboxes, daily backups.

Why no cron jobs?

Scheduled tasks are the first thing abused on a free tier — for crawling, for mining, for mailing — and the cost lands on every other site on the server. Anything that needs to run on a schedule belongs on a VPS, where the resources are yours.

More about the free plan