How do you host a website for free?

Comments

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

• Heroku - Self-made backend; however, if you use your URL, getting HTTPS is a little complex (might need Cloudflare).
• Firebase hosting - Firebase suite -- login / database / functions / analytics
• Netlify - CDN-based static hosting with optimizations (you can choose plugins) / also Netlify functions are free to an extent.
• Vercel - Easy static hosting with serverless functions / also support things like Heroku to some extent.
• GitHub Pages - Static hosting OR Jekyll-based

[Alan Telles]

Is it possible to have https for free in heroku?

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

*.herokuapp.com has HTTPS by default, but just need to redirect your server for it.

Custom domain can have HTTPS, if you either,

• Use at least Hobby Plan (i.e. pay around 7 USD / mo)
• Hide behind an HTTPS proxy -- I use Cloudflare in this case.

[Alan Telles]

I deployed a flask site and all the relative links points to http. I open with https, but the internal links point to http

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

Have you tried --

python flask redirect to https from http

Aug 26 '15 Comments: 1 Answers: 10

28

I have a website build using python3.4 and flask...I have generated my own self-signed certificate and I am currently testing my website through localhost.

I am using the python ssl module along with this flask extension: github.com/kennethreitz/flask-sslify

context = ('my-cert.pem', 'my-key.pem')
app = Flask(__name__)
sslify = SSLify(app)

...

if __name__

…

Open Full Question

You don't need a real SSL certificate, BTW. Just need to differentiate DEVELOPMENT from PRODUCTION.

You can also adapt this code, as some of the things are Heroku-specific.

help.heroku.com/J2R1S4T8/can-herok...

[Brad]

great list of free resources!

[Panda Quests]

Indeed

[Panda Quests]

Thanks. Great list

[Philippe Roubert]

You can also use AWS' free tier. Been hosting my site there for free 👍

[seveneye]

May I know what product are you using for the free tier. EC2 ? Elastic beanstalk?

[Philippe Roubert]

Just checked, I'm running an Elastic Beanstalk app itself running an EC2 instance.

Elastic Beanstalk doesn't cost anything. EC2 has 750 hours free per month (which ultimately means you can only run one instance) for 12 months.

[Panda Quests]

Is it for free forever? Or only for a limited time, e.g. 30 day?

[Philippe Roubert]

Pretty sure it's forever, the catch isn't about how long you use it but rather how much computational power you use. But for a small site, you shouldn't worry about it much. I have a site with max. a couple of thousand views per month and never had to pay a cent.

[Panda Quests]

But what happens when there is a spike of views, e.g. a DOS attack? Would you have to pay then or did you make some precaution that the views would never reach a certain threshold?

[Philippe Roubert]

It seems like AWS has its own DDOS protection service
aws.amazon.com/shield/?whats-new-c...

I personally haven't undertaken any measures regarding denial of service attacks, perhaps if my site reaches a certain size.

AWS can be quite confusing, but it's the biggest hosting provider at the moment (I believe), I think it's worth looking it up and researching 👍

[Philippe Roubert]

Apologies, I need to correct myself!
I made a little bit of research, it's free for 12 months, so not indefenitely.

However, once these 12 months are done, you only pay what you use.

[Panda Quests]

Thanks for clarifying

[William Henderson]

GitHub Pages ftw

[Aleksandr Hovhannisyan]

GitHub Pages is great, but eventually you come to realize that it's not. Netlify has so much more that GitHub Pages is lacking—plugins, redeploys, stop auto publishing, and a bunch of other useful features.

[Panda Quests]

I'm hosting my website for free on github pages, too. But it doesn't support https. Therefore most people would see an warning page.

[William Henderson]

Not only does it support https, it forces it... Have you messed up the configuration?

[Panda Quests]

Ah, my bad. It is using https. But the certificate is not valid:

pandaquests.de

[William Henderson]

That's because your certificate is provided by GitHub but your hostname doesn't match... I think you have to either switch to http or provide your own certificate

[Panda Quests]

Ok. I'll have a look how I can provide a certificate.

[Ari Kalfus]

You can use a custom domain with GitHub Pages and get a valid certificate from Let's Encrypt automatically. You need to ensure you have a CNAME file in your repo and your DNS settings are set up correctly. Check out docs.github.com/en/github/working-...

[Panda Quests]

Hmm... I think I did that. But it still says my certificate is invalid

[Andrew Baisden]

Netlify, Vercel, Heroku, Github Pages

[Panda Quests]

I'm also using ghPages. Will look into the others. Thanks

[Kostja Appliku.com]

aws.amazon.com/ AWS gives you a year of free resources.
appliku.com/ gives you a free plan to deploy your app on AWS, so you don't have to waste time on DevOps

Full disclosure – I am maker of Appliku.

[preyas prathap]

Netlify

[Vuelancer]

Free static site hosting services

• Hostman
• Surge
• Deta - nodejs app

[Zen]

For my blog (mzaini30.js.org)

Hosting: Github Pages (free)
Domain: JS.org (free)

For web app demo

Hosting frontend: Github Pages (Vue, free)
Hosting backend: nasihosting.com (PHP, MySQL, free)

[Jon Randy 🎖️]

fast.io for static sites

[Praneeth]

Firebase Hosting, Vercel etc

[Panda Quests]

Thanks, I'll have a look