Heroku killed its free plan in November 2022. AWS Lightsail is a 90-day trial, not a free tier. 000webhost shut down in October 2024. Fly.io stopped offering free plans to new accounts. Most free PHP hosting
lists you'll find online still recommend hosts that no longer exist. This one doesn't. What follows is nine options for running a PHP site in 2026 without paying — split into three honest categories — with a comparison table so you can skip to the one that fits.
| # | Host | Always free? | Card required | RAM / storage | PHP version | SSL | Custom domain | Deploy method |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | InfinityFree | Yes | No | Unmetered* / 5 GB | 8.3 | Free (Let's Encrypt) | Yes | FTP, Softaculous |
| 2 | TinkerHost | Yes | No | 1 GB / 5 GB bw | 8.x | Free | Yes | FTP, Softaculous |
| 3 | Byet.host | Yes | No | Unlimited bw / 5 GB | 8.3 | Free (Let's Encrypt) | Yes | FTP, Softaculous |
| 4 | AwardSpace | Yes | No | 1 GB / 5 GB bw | 7 only ⚠️ | Free | Yes (1 domain) | FTP, cPanel |
| 5 | Oracle Cloud Always Free | Yes | Verification only | 24 GB RAM / 200 GB total | Any (you install) | Free (Let's Encrypt, self-install) | Yes | SSH, SFTP, Git |
| 6 | Google Cloud e2-micro |
Yes | Verification only | 1 GB / 30 GB | Any (you install) | Free (self-install) | Yes | SSH, SFTP, Git |
| 7 | AWS Lightsail | No — 90-day trial | Yes | 512 MB / 20 GB | Any (you install) | Free | Yes | SSH, SFTP, Git |
| 8 | Koyeb | Free allowance | Verification only | 512 MB / 1 GB outbound | Native PHP | Free | Yes | Git, Docker |
| 9 | Render free web service | Free allowance | Yes | 512 MB / ephemeral | Via Docker | Free | Yes (custom SSL) | Git, Docker |
*InfinityFree's unmetered
means unlimited bandwidth with a fair-use hit cap (~50,000 hits/day).
A quick decision tree:
- I just want my PHP site online and don't want to touch a server → InfinityFree, TinkerHost, or Byet.host.
- I want a real Linux VM to learn on or install anything → Oracle Cloud Always Free (most generous in the entire industry) or Google Cloud
e2-micro. - I want a modern Git/Docker workflow → Koyeb or Render.
- I need more than any free tier can give → the cheapest honest answer is a $3.50-$5/month VPS; at that price, one coffee a month buys predictable hosting.
Category 1: Always-free shared PHP hosts
These hosts run your PHP files on their shared servers. Zero setup, no ads on the page itself, but limited resources and some control tradeoffs.
1. InfinityFree
Website: infinityfree.com
What's free: Unlimited websites, unmetered bandwidth (fair-use cap ~50,000 hits/day), 5 GB disk, 400 MySQL databases, PHP 8.3, free SSL via Let's Encrypt, custom domains supported.
What's missing: 10-second max PHP execution time, no SSH access, no crons on the free tier, and the dashboard pushes upgrade prompts. Hit-count enforcement kicks in if you get a traffic spike — your site can be temporarily suspended.
Best for: Small portfolio sites, WordPress blogs with light traffic, learning projects, contact-form-only PHP scripts.
Deploy with: FTP or the built-in Softaculous one-click installer (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.).
2. TinkerHost
Website: tinkerhost.com
What's free: 1 GB storage, 5 GB monthly bandwidth, one MySQL database, PHP 8, free SSL, Softaculous installer with 300+ scripts. After 000webhost shut down in October 2024, TinkerHost (operated by ThinkHost) became the most-recommended drop-in replacement for that specific niche of free FTP host with one-click installers.
What's missing: 10 MB max upload size, no SSH access, no cron jobs, no email accounts on the free tier. Dashboard nudges you toward paid hosting. Not built for traffic — the bandwidth cap is genuinely small.
Best for: Demos, learning PHP, hobby projects, small WordPress installs.
Deploy with: FTP, File Manager in the control panel.
3. Byet.host
Website: byet.host
What's free (as of April 2026): 5 GB disk, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited MySQL databases (MariaDB 11.4), PHP 8.3, free Let's Encrypt SSL, free *.byet.org subdomain or your own custom domain, Softaculous installer.
What's missing: 10 MB max file upload size, shared IP (occasional bad-neighbor issues), no SSH access on the free tier, no free cron jobs.
Best for: Hobby PHP projects with reasonable traffic, subdomain portfolios, anyone who needs more than InfinityFree's hit cap allows.
Deploy with: FTP.
Note: Byet and InfinityFree are both run by iFastNet, so the underlying infrastructure is similar. Byet has the better disk + bandwidth allowance; InfinityFree has the better PHP-execution-limit story. If one starts throttling you, the other is the natural fallback.
4. AwardSpace (⚠️ not recommended)
Website: awardspace.com
What's free: 1 GB storage, 5 GB bandwidth, one custom domain, one MySQL database, free SSL, cPanel access.
Why we still mention it: Every free PHP hosting
list still recommends AwardSpace. We're including it so you know to skip it.
Why to skip it: AwardSpace's free plan still serves PHP 7 in 2026. PHP 7 reached end-of-life in November 2022 — no security patches, no compatibility with most modern frameworks. Running a site on PHP 7 in 2026 is a security liability. If you must use AwardSpace, restrict it to static HTML or pre-existing PHP 7 code that you're already maintaining; do not start a new project there.
Better alternatives: InfinityFree, TinkerHost, or Byet.host (all on PHP 8.x).
Category 2: Always free
cloud VMs (you install PHP yourself)
These are full Linux VMs. You ssh in, install Apache/Nginx + PHP + MariaDB/PostgreSQL, and run what you want. Higher ceiling than shared hosting but you're the sysadmin now.
5. Oracle Cloud Always Free
Website: oracle.com/cloud/free
What's free (as of April 2026): 2 AMD VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro VMs plus up to 4 ARM Ampere A1 OCPUs and 24 GB RAM (splittable across up to 4 instances), 200 GB total block storage, 10 TB egress per month, 2 autonomous databases (Oracle Database, 20 GB each), 1 load balancer. All always free
— no time limit, no expiration.
What's missing: Credit card required at signup for identity verification (Oracle states clearly that the card is not charged for Always Free resources, but the requirement still stops some users). ARM Always Free capacity is frequently out of stock in many regions — provisioning can take retries across hours or days. Pick a less-popular region (e.g. Frankfurt or Mumbai instead of Phoenix or Ashburn) for better availability.
Best for: The most generous always-free compute tier in the industry. If you can get an ARM A1 instance, 24 GB RAM and 4 cores is enough to run a full LAMP stack with room for Redis, a queue worker, and a staging copy.
Deploy with: SSH plus any Git-based workflow. This is where DeployHQ's free plan becomes useful — push to GitHub, DeployHQ rsyncs to the Oracle VM over SSH on every push.
6. Google Cloud e2-micro
Website: cloud.google.com/free
What's free (Always Free tier): 1 e2-micro instance in us-west1 (Oregon), us-central1 (Iowa), or us-east1 (South Carolina) — 2 vCPUs (shared), 1 GB RAM, 30 GB standard persistent disk, 1 GB egress per month to most of the world (excluding China and Australia).
What's missing: Credit card required. 1 GB RAM fills up fast once you're running Apache + MariaDB on the same box — plan to swap or move the DB to a managed service. Only three US regions qualify for the free tier (no Europe, Asia, or Australia). 1 GB egress per month is genuinely tight; a single moderately-shared blog post can blow through it.
Best for: A small US-audience blog, a memcached-only sidecar, a personal staging environment, or a low-traffic API.
Deploy with: SSH, gcloud compute scp, or a Git-based pipeline. Automated deployments from GitHub work here too.
7. AWS Lightsail (90-day trial, not actually free)
Website: aws.amazon.com/lightsail
What you actually get: A 90-day free trial covering 750 hours/month on the $3.50/month, $5/month, or $10/month plans. After 90 days, your instance will be billed at the plan's monthly rate.
What's missing: This is not an always-free option — we're including it for completeness because most free PHP hosting
posts (including the previous version of this one) list it as free. Plan for the $3.50/month bill on day 91, or shut the instance down before then.
Best for: Testing AWS before committing. Honest answer: if you're paying $3.50/month anyway, just budget for a real VPS at the same price.
Deploy with: SSH, SFTP, Git. See deploying via SSH/SFTP with DeployHQ for the full workflow.
Category 3: Free allowances on modern platforms
These platforms ask for a credit card (verification only — no charges if you stay within limits) and offer enough to run a real PHP app. Free
here means free up to a usage cap,
not time-boxed trial.
8. Koyeb
Website: koyeb.com
What's free (as of April 2026): One web service with 1 vCPU shared, 512 MB RAM, 1 GB outbound bandwidth per month, deployed in Koyeb's Washington D.C. region. Free tier never expires. Native PHP support — no Dockerfile required for standard PHP apps. Custom domains, automatic HTTPS, deploy-on-push from GitHub or GitLab.
What's missing: Credit card required at signup (verification only — Koyeb confirms it doesn't charge for free-tier usage). Single region, so non-US users get higher latency. 1 GB outbound is the limiting factor — fine for an API or low-traffic admin site, but a public blog will exceed it.
Best for: Small Laravel/Symfony APIs, internal tools, low-traffic public sites where the modern Git-push-to-deploy workflow matters more than raw resources.
Deploy with: Connect a Git repo (GitHub or GitLab), Koyeb auto-deploys on every push. Dockerfile is optional.
9. Render free web service
Website: render.com
What's free: One free web service with 512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU, free PostgreSQL for 30 days (then $7/month), automatic SSL, custom domains.
What's missing: Free web services sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity and take 30-60 seconds to wake up on the first request — bad UX for anything public-facing. No background workers on the free tier. PHP requires a custom Docker image (Render's native runtimes are Node, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, and Elixir — not PHP). Postgres free tier is now 30 days, not 90.
Best for: Admin dashboards and internal tools where 30-second cold-start is acceptable. Not public sites.
Deploy with: Connect your Git repo, Render builds and deploys on every push. Dockerfile required for PHP.
How to deploy to any of these with DeployHQ
For shared hosts (InfinityFree, TinkerHost, Byet.host), DeployHQ deploys directly over FTP — connect once, push to Git, DeployHQ syncs only the changed files.
For cloud VMs (Oracle, Google Cloud, Lightsail), DeployHQ deploys over SSH/SFTP. The typical setup:
- Create the VM and install Apache/Nginx + PHP.
- Generate an SSH key pair in DeployHQ and paste the public key into
~/.ssh/authorized_keyson your VM. - In DeployHQ, add the VM as a server with hostname (your static IP), username (
ubuntu,bitnami, oropcdepending on the AMI), and SSH key auth. See 5 ways to create SSH keys for DeployHQ. - Set the deployment path — usually
/var/www/htmlon Ubuntu or/opt/bitnami/apache2/htdocson Bitnami. - Add a Composer build command (
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader). - Enable auto-deploy-on-push.
For Koyeb and Render, you're already in a Git/Docker workflow — DeployHQ isn't strictly needed for the deploy itself, but it's still useful for orchestrating secrets and environment-variable management across multiple environments.
DeployHQ's free plan covers one project, 20 deployments per month, and 30 build-minutes — enough for a personal PHP site with weekly pushes. Sign up at deployhq.com/signup if you want to try it.
So which one should you pick?
- Lowest effort, zero sysadmin: InfinityFree (largest hit allowance for static-ish PHP) or Byet.host (best bandwidth headroom).
- Most resources at $0: Oracle Cloud Always Free — 24 GB RAM is hard to beat anywhere.
- Modern Git-push workflow: Koyeb (native PHP) or Render (Docker required).
- Best for anyone who's serious: budget $3.50-$5 per month for a real VPS. DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, and Lightsail-after-trial all start there. The free tier is a great place to start, but the ceiling is real — hit it once and you'll be glad to pay a coffee per month for reliability and predictable performance.
Have questions, or found an option that should be on the list? Reach out at support@deployhq.com or find us on X.