So, after using 000webhost for a while now, it becomes quite a chore to update wordpress plugins and themes if their compressed file size is over the limit that 000webhost allows. The way I had been doing it was to wait until I had quite a few to update then downloading each plugin manually and extracting it, then using filezilla to upload all the files. This might not sound like much, but it can get quite tedious if you compare it to the way you would usually update a plugin – click “update all” from the update centre in wordpress. The best way I’ve found to update plugins is to do the following:

1. Download plugin manually
2. Connect to FTP using the site http://www.net2ftp.com
3. Navigate to the public_html/wp-content/plugins/
4. Click upload, then on the right there is an option to upload zipped files, which are automatically uncompressed by their server and the files uploaded to the directory.
5. Select the zip file you downloaded for any plugins you need to update
6. click the green tick and wait for the files to upload. It may take a while, so best to just leave it to get on with it.

It may complain that it “Could not create directory blah blah” and this will most likely be that the directory already exists, so just ignore it. You can also update themes, just select the themes directory rather than plugins.