Free PHP Hosting Services
Comparison Benchmark Results

The graph chart below shows a list of free PHP hosts that a custom PHP benchmark script has been run on which calculated the average execution times in milliseconds (ms) after 12 runs at 5-second intervals, and removing the highest and lowest completion times of the benchmarked hosts. The test results from the PHP performance benchmark script are sorted from best (fastest; lowest PHP execution times) to the worst (slowest; highest numbers). There are currently about 100 Free PHP Web Hosting sites listed with reviews in our database, but these are some of the more popular ones that I still have a free web hosting account on.

The Free PHP benchmark performance script (download free) that was used for benchmarking the free PHP web hosting services performs some simple math and string functions 20,000 times each, and measures how long it takes to complete the PHP execution (this speed calculation does not include MySQL database queries or page loading times). This was repeated 12 times via a Javascript redirect to the script again, with 5 second delays. Then the average completion time was computed after removing the highest and lowest script execution times (in other words, the benchmark score is the average of the middle 10 scores).

Note that several of these benchmarked free PHP hosts have free hosting accounts on multiple servers, so the benchmark test results / speeds may vary greatly on their other web servers. Also the results could vary depending on the site's peak hours and varying server load at the moment. The PHP benchmarks data below was gathered August 24, 2006 for all but the newer freehosts listed. I was very surprised at the fastest two hosts listed. In fact, several of the fastest free web servers below were faster than a very expensive managed dedicated server I rent, and much faster than the dedicated web hosting server this website is hosted on.