Free hosting that runs PHP is a shrinking category. AwardSpace is one of the oldest survivors — a Bulgarian host that has given away LAMP accounts without banner ads since 2003 — and it is the usual second name people reach for after InfinityFree.

Every figure below comes from AwardSpace's own knowledge base and Terms of Services, plus two checks I ran directly against their infrastructure on 19 August 2026. Nothing here is copied from a review site.

What the AwardSpace Free Plan Includes

You get AwardSpace's own control panel (not cPanel), a web file manager, phpMyAdmin, and the Zacky installer, which sets up WordPress or Joomla in a few clicks. The disk, traffic and visit figures are from AwardSpace's knowledge base; the database, mail, inode and FTP numbers are written into their Terms of Services.

The Free Plan Has No HTTPS

This is the fact that decides most projects, and it is easy to miss because AwardSpace's marketing pages advertise free SSL. The knowledge base is unambiguous: using SSL "is a premium feature," and if you are on the free service you should upgrade, because "our free hosting does not support SSL."

I verified what that looks like in practice. Requesting a live free-plan site over HTTPS on 19 August 2026 returned a certificate issued for f28-preview.runhosting.com — a shared server hostname, not the site's own — so certificate validation fails and a browser shows a full-page security warning. Plain HTTP served the same page normally (Apache, HTTP 200). AwardSpace's own parent domains have valid certificates; a free user's site does not get one.

Consequences worth spelling out: Chrome marks the site "Not secure," you cannot responsibly accept a login or a contact form, service workers and several browser APIs refuse to run, and Google has treated HTTPS as a ranking signal for a decade. For a coursework demo or a static portfolio this is survivable. For anything that takes input, it is disqualifying.

PHP Can't Call the Outside World

The second structural limit, straight from the Terms of Services: "Outgoing Connections are disabled on the free hosting servers for security reasons." It is enforced by disabling the PHP functions that make them. Per AwardSpace's published list, the free platform blocks:

allow_url_fopen  fsockopen   pfsockpen   curl_init
exec             passthru    set_time_limit
realpath         link        chown       chgrp
dl               leak        listen
getrusage  get_current_user  getmyuid    getmypid

With curl_init(), fsockopen() and allow_url_fopen all gone, no PHP code on the account can reach another server. What breaks, in order of how often it bites people:

• WordPress core, theme and plugin updates — the update check is an outbound HTTP call.
• Any plugin that phones home: licence checks, Akismet, analytics, SEO tools, external SMTP.
• Payment gateways, OAuth logins, weather widgets, RSS importers — anything consuming a third-party API.

WordPress installs and runs, but treat it as a site you update by re-uploading files over FTP, not one that maintains itself.

Content Filtering Returns 403 on Certain Words

A quirk almost no review mentions, and it is documented: because of abuse on the free servers, AwardSpace runs automatic content filtering. Their terms reserve the right to "filter abusive words and/or links due to security reasons (i.e. words or links of PayPal, eBay, AOL, Amazon [not limited to])."

The symptom is a page that returns 403 Forbidden for no obvious reason. If you are building an affiliate blog, a review site, or anything that names a big commerce brand, expect pages to vanish on the free plan.

What You Can and Can't Run

There is also a fair-use rule people trip over: no more than 10% of your space may be images, media, archives, PDFs or database dumps. A 1 GB account is meant to hold a website, not files.

Sleeping, Expiry and Commercial Use

Nothing sleeps — this is shared Apache, not a container that scales to zero, so there is no cold start. What can switch your site off is inactivity, and there are two separate clocks:

• No traffic at all for 12 months → the account is set to inactive. You get 3 notifications over 5 days, then it is blocked, then 3 more notifications over 5 days, after which the account and its data are permanently deleted.
• The free service is valid for one year from signup, renewed automatically each time you log in. No human login for over a year and the account counts as expired. Automated logins to farm validity are explicitly disallowed.

Blow the 5 GB monthly traffic cap and the site shows an over-quota message while FTP and the file manager are disabled, until the counter resets at the start of the next month. Commercial sites are allowed and there are no forced ads, but there is no SLA — keep your own backups of files and database.

Where the Servers Are

One region, no picker. AwardSpace states its data center is Telepoint in Sofia, Bulgaria, a Tier 3+ carrier-neutral facility. I confirmed it independently: the free-subdomain hosts resolve to 185.176.40.84, which geolocates to Sofia on AS44476, Zetta Hosting Solutions — one of AwardSpace's two parent companies.

I have not benchmarked page-load speed, and no honest figure is available without deploying to the platform. What the geography guarantees regardless: European visitors get the shortest round trips, North America pays a transatlantic hop, and Asia-Pacific pays the most. You cannot fix that with a CDN either — without SSL on the origin, putting Cloudflare in front means proxying HTTPS to an insecure backend.

AwardSpace vs the Alternatives

Choose AwardSpace if you want a mailbox on your own domain, a small ad-free PHP or WordPress site, and you genuinely do not need HTTPS — a class assignment, a personal page, a staging copy.

Choose InfinityFree for almost any public-facing site, because free SSL and five times the disk matter more than a mailbox.

Choose a free VPS the moment you need HTTPS plus outbound API calls, cron, SSH, or a language that isn't PHP. It costs you an afternoon of setup and removes every wall above.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AwardSpace free hosting really free forever?

Yes, with conditions. No credit card, no trial period, no forced ads — it is funded by paid upgrades. But the account expires a year after signup unless you log in, and it is permanently deleted after roughly 12 months with zero traffic. One free account per person; duplicates are removed.

Can I use my own domain on the free plan?

Yes — one custom domain plus three free subdomains, which is unusually generous for a free host. It will serve over plain HTTP only, since the free plan has no SSL support.

Can I run WordPress on AwardSpace free hosting?

It installs in a few clicks through the Zacky installer and runs fine. Plan around three limits: no HTTPS for the login page, no outbound connections so core and plugin auto-updates fail, and a 30 MB database that a busy plugin set will fill. Keep the install lean and update by FTP.

Will AwardSpace shut down like 000webhost did?

Nobody can promise otherwise, but the structure is reassuring: AwardSpace has run since 2003, is backed by two parent companies (Zetta Hosting Solutions and AttractSoft GmbH), and funds the free tier out of paid plans rather than out of free users. That said, free hosting carries no SLA and no obligation to keep your data. Back up your files and database yourself.

The Verdict

AwardSpace is honest, ad-free, and old enough to trust with a hobby project — and its free plan is now defined less by its 1 GB of disk than by two hard walls: no HTTPS, and no outbound connections from PHP. Those two make it a place to park a small site, not a place to build anything that talks to the internet or takes a visitor's data.

If that describes your project, sign up with an email address and be online in minutes. If it doesn't, InfinityFree gives you SSL and more room for the same $0, and a free VPS gives you everything at the cost of an afternoon.

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