Hosting Your Web Development Projects For Free [A How-To Guide]

Written by jure | Published 2020/04/18
Tech Story Tags: web-hosting | learn-to-code | web-development | tech | learning-to-code | programming | host-on-google-cloud | hosting-website-on-aws | web-monetization

TLDR Google Cloud can be used for a lot of things, but the thing that we are currently looking at is hosting. The important thing to know is that, although hosting and domains, that I am gonna show you here are free, they are not made for heavy use. They are best if you just want your projects to be on the internet, so when you get to the job interview, you have something to show. If you don’t know how to code and actually create a website, here are a couple of courses I recommend to learn.via the TL;DR App

Many people (myself included) don’t host their personal projects, because it usually costs money, right? The thing is that those projects don’t matter if no one can see them. How are you going to prove someone that you’ve to build 3 real-world projects if he can’t see them? There is a solution for that, and that’s free hosting. In this article, I’ll give you a few best free hosting options that you can use to host your projects. Let’s get started!

The important thing to know is that, although hosting and domains, that I am gonna show you here are free, they are not made for heavy use. They are best if you just want your projects to be on the internet, so when you get to the job interview, you have something to show.

1. Google Cloud

The first, and my favorite one, is Google Cloud. Google Cloud can be used for a lot of things, but the thing that we are currently looking at is hosting. For hosting, you have a few services that you can use.
The first is Compute Engine which is a virtual machine that is run on Google servers, I won’t go into a detail explanation on how you can use it this article.
These Google cloud services are usually charged, but they have a free play where they give you one F1-micro, which is basically a shared core CPU. So, as long as, your application doesn’t require heavy use, it will be fine.
The next service from Google is Cloud Function. That’s basically a way that you can store a backend for your website. The free plan offers you 2 million invocations and 400,000 GB-seconds of runtime and that only counts when you’re actually sending a request to the server. In my opinion, this is probably the best solution, because it allows relatively high usage.
There are also other services from Google, like App Engine and Cloud Run, which are also great, but I won’t go too deep into them in this article.
If you need a powerful and reliable hosting, the one that I recommend is BlueHost.

2. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon web services are basically the same a the Google Cloud. They also offer a lot of different products, but the one that we are looking for is AWS Lambda. The free plan offers up to 1,000,000 requests and 3.2 million seconds of computing time per month.
AWS Lambda also offers 400,000 GB-seconds of computing time per month. So, very similar to Google Cloud, but you get 1 million requests less.

3. GitHub

GitHub is one very popular solution for hosting your projects for free. You simply create an account and you can host a project for as long as you want. The biggest downside, in my opinion, is that GitHub doesn’t support any server-side languages such as Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.
Instead, you can only host static websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So, if your project doesn’t require the back-end, GitHub is probably the easiest solution.
If you would want to take advantage of these free web hostings, but don’t know how to code and actually create a website, here are a couple of courses I recommend to learn that:

Conclusion

That’s basically all I could find. Of course, there’re other hosting companies that offer free plans to get more costumes, but the ones that I’ve found only offer barebones plans.
So, now you have a solution to host your projects for free, I hope that it’ll help you.
I hope that I have helped you with this article. If you liked this article, make sure to share it with your friends.
Also, if you think that I have missed something or you have any other questions, be sure to post your questions in the comments or send me an email at [email protected], I will be happy to answer them.

Written by jure | Hi, my name is Jure Reljanović. I like learning about coding and technology and helping others by sharing my experience.
Published by HackerNoon on 2020/04/18