If a monthly payment plan is what is holding you up from launching your website or portfolio, then you'll be relieved to know that there are now many ways to setup, configure and deploy a website in as little as 5 minutes and with absolutely no cost to you. At least, any cost to start and with some limitations, but still very much worth the looking into.
Most modern hosting platforms want you to switch from your older outdated shared hosting platforms, into more scalable and optimized solutions, such as cloud hosting and services. That means that most offer some form of free-tier catered to developers so that they can get started with their platforms.
So there's no excuse for not at least starting that next big project. Here I have compiled my top 5 choices if you are looking to get your projects up and running for free.
5. Netlify
Netlify is a serverless platform designed to build and deploy modern and high performing web applications.
The standout feature with Netlify is that you can connect any external repository that you may have, from either GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab and Netlify can deploy your web applications detect changes automatically and continuously deploy.
You also have the freedom to choose just how you want to deploy and build your applications in what is now considered a JAM Stack environment. Serverless architecture, like JAM Stack, takes away many of the hassle's that come with maintaining a hosting environment by pretty much offloading that work to other services.
For example, in Netlify you can create a React application which pulls data from the Contentful CMS and that is managed by Netlify. Or you can launch a Next.js application which pulls data from Airtable and that is managed by Netlify.
That flexibility is what makes Netlify ideal for any developer looking for cloud web hosting.
4. Heroku
Heroku is a cloud application platform that allows developers to host projects written in any of the following officially supported languages.
- Node.js
- Ruby
- Java
- PHP
- Python
- Go
- Scala
- Closure
You can also use other languages that run on Linux using third party buildpacks as well.
And aside from the free tier, there is alot to like about Heroku. For one, your applications run in the Heroku Runtime.
You can think of the runtime as a container where you application executes. And the management of that container is already handled for you. Everything from configuration to load-balancing is built in to the runtime.
Heroku also provides Heroku Redis. Redis is an open-sourced in-memory data structure store that is idea for storing key-value pairs. Heroku Redis is that exact same tool, but provided as a service through Heroku.
My favorite feature though is the scalability of Heroku. You can run a simple blog with a few hundred daily visitors, to an e-commerce website with tens of thousands of requests and scale as needed. That means that you only pay for the resources that you end up using. If you have seasonal traffic spikes, this type of scalability is the ideal configuration.
Heroku also offers GitHub integration, meaning that every pull request creates a Review App that you can use for testing and which can be disposed for later use.
Alot of features, easy to use and easily to scale as needed.
3. GitHub Pages
Quite possibly the simplest way to get a website up and running in under 5 minutes. GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service that renders files directly from a repository hosted on GitHub.
You can render HTML, CSS and JavaScript or you can also run files through a build process as needed.
GitHub Pages can be used to host one of 3 kinds of websites. You can either host a personal site linked to your GitHub username, your company's website linked to your GitHub organization account or a website about your GitHub projects.
You can only create one user or organization web application per user account. You can however create unlimited websites for your public repositories.
Best of all, you don't have to start a project from scratch. GitHub Pages are powered by Jekyll, the static site generator written in Ruby. And if you aren't familiar with Ruby, that's perfectly fine, as the total setup can be done with a few command-line statements.
This is a great way to run hobby projects with little configuration or maintenance cost. The best part is that if you already have a GitHub account created, deploying your personal GitHub Page is as simple as creating a repo with the appropriate name and uploading the related files.
2. Vercel
Similar to GitHub Pages, Vercel allows you to set up a web application by simply pointing your project to the repository of your choice. And that's where the similarities pretty much stop, because Vercel offers many more features designed around performance and scalability.
For one, Vercel offers support for over 30 frameworks, including Next.js, React, Angular and Vue.js.
Vercel also heavily focuses on collaboration and teams. A big part of that is in showcasing updates in a preview before being finalized and sent to production. Every Git branch and PR in Vercel includes its own preview URL, which can be shared with your team for review.
Once your changes are checked in and merged, Vercel leverages its global edge network to better serve your applications to users worldwide with optimal performance.
There's alot to like here overall, and the hobby tier gives you enough resources so that you can deploy your mid-tier applications with ease and scale up only when needed.
1. Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform is an all encompassing cloud based solution for pretty much all of your technical needs.
Similar to Azure, GCP can scale up as needed and you are only charged for what you use.
Many services in GCP offer free-tiers or monthly limits available to all users of the platform. For website deployment, the App Engine service offers 28 hours per day of "F" instances and 9 hours per day of "B" instances. These are relatively low-resource server instances, but they should be enough for low-complexity applications.
The free-tier in the App Engine also gives you 1GB of free storage and data traffic. This may sound limited, but for someone getting started with a new web application, this is more than enough storage space.
If interested, Google Cloud Platform supports several popular programming languages and frameworks, such as PHP, Go, Java, Node.js and even .NET.
As a web developer it's also highly beneficial to be familiar with the many different hosting alternatives that there are today, so setting up applications in each of these platforms will make you into an overall more well-rounded programmer.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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