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Free hosting for developers.

Sasidharan on June 24, 2020

More Free resources Static websites are web pages with fixed content and its constant. But now static sites also handle dynamic data using APIs an...
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katiekodes profile image
Katie • Edited

It's mind-boggling the way advertisement-free hosting for small web sites has become a "product giveaway" like socks at a vendor booth.

I'll take it, though.

(This is why I've been spending so much time playing with the CMS ecosystem for static sites in my recent Dev posts. I love the idea of eliminating a friend's $100/year Wordpress hosting bill and their $90/year Squarespace-ish site bill.)

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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani

I’m slowly getting into Gatsby, I think I like the idea of it but I am not convinced yet.

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katiekodes profile image
Katie

Yeah, Gatsby seems to be the way all the CMSes that're closest to Squarespace are leaning, so I'm working my way through learning enough JavaScript / React to make some "buy vs. build" decisions for my friend. (They do really like their Squarespace-ish site.)

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pedro_dgcouto profile image
Pedro Couto

Firebase also offers a free hosting service 😉

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patzistar profile image
Patrick Schadler

I use firebase for hosting my portfolio site & I love it so far.

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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani

Cool! No costs? What’s the stack? I pay like $10 a month for years now.

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patzistar profile image
Patrick Schadler

I just served static files, so no real requirements there. The site is build with ReactJS though.
There is a free tier with 1GB Storage and 10GB Bandwith, which is enough for me.

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

Use your preferred stack like JAM, react site, gatsby, or any static site generators and also single page application builds.

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

Cool!

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

Forgot to add!:)

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

Will add.Thanks for sharing!

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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani

At what point does hosting personal sites become painful on these free services. What have people’s experiences been as their needs have grown? I know a friend who made some pretty bad design decisions and started getting bills from AWS for a few hundred $$$ a month. I have never looked much into it tbh.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro • Edited

Unless your friend's website serves hundreds of millions of static files a month, it's impossible to pay $hundreds to host a static site on AWS with S3 and CloudFront. Just look at the pricing and do the math: how many static HTTP requests does he have to serve to even get to $100?

  • 1 Million HTTP requests on CloudFront costs $0.75.
  • Consider 25 Kb per request, on average, and you'll pay extra $2,12 for bandwidth

If you store this data in S3 and use CloudFront cache wisely, you'll pay very little to S3 Get requests. Even without using cache at all (which is absurd):

  • You'd pay only $0.40 for 1 Million S3 Get requests.

A little over $3 for 1 Million requests per month.

And that's for you to have:

  • Robustness: one of the greatest cloud infrastructures on Earth
  • Peace of mind: everything managed by one of the best DevOps teams money can buy
  • Zero commitment: pay only for what you really use
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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani • Edited

I did not say he hosted a static site making simple http requests, I said he made several bad architectural design decisions. This is the only real point of reference I have, so I was asking if any one else had similar experiences.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

I don't see how one could make such bad architectural decisions in S3 and CloudFront that would make a regular Joe website hosting cost $hundreds.

He's probably using EC2, renting fancy servers with multi-region high availability, load balancer, etc, perhaps?

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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani

He was using EC2 and allowing users to upload images and videos, he did zero compression and simply re-served the content full-size images and videos.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

That explains, than. EC2 should be used for dynamic processing. Static data should be in S3 and CloudFront, ideally. Even for dynamic needs, I'd recommend using Lambda, if technically possible.

As the math shows, it's darn cheap for small and mid-sized needs. If you ever get to hundreds of millions or billions of requests/month (or really large files), than it's worth looking at cheaper alternatives to AWS.

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan • Edited

If you change your Objects in s3 very often/ updating code frequently will costs for CRUD in s3.Considering that makes little bad for me. But its ok.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro • Edited

True. On average, though, website static files are updated infrequently. You might have one or another file updated more regularly, but the overall update rate will be very low in comparison to the total number of files stored.

And if you are indeed updating some things very frequently, depending on what it is (e.g. a JSON string), it might be worth considering a more dynamic storage solution.

The equivalent to an S3 PUT operation is 4x cheaper on DynamoDB (Write op), for instance. "S3 GET" operation is 1.6x more expensive than a DynamoDB Read op. And that is for Dynamo On-demand. If you have a somewhat stable and predictable demand, Provisioned Throughput would be even cheaper. That is considering a small object with <4kb in size for Reads and <1kb for writes.

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fasani profile image
Michael Fasani • Edited

You seem pretty knowledgeable on AWS. I’m thinking about the following... I plan to setup a Gatsby site. I plan to use GitHub actions to push to S3 on commit to master. Adding cloud front to CDN it. Then I will write either a Rust or Node comments system and put it on EC2 so when a person comments that will push a commit to GitHub to be merged later by me and redeploy that commit to S3. I know this may sound like a bit of effort but the goal for me is to learn Rust, Gatsby and AWS. I also may use serverless for the comments system. I know I could just use Lightsail but I already have a fully managed hosting solution that I could use. It’s more about having fun! Does this sound like a decent/correct approach in your opinion? I haven’t done any kind of DevOps for about 15 years, I only decided yesterday that I will learn some AWS. Thanks!

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro • Edited

As a project for learning, it seems very interesting. For production workloads, this doesn't seem like an efficient architecture.

Personally, I tend to stay away from EC2 as much as I can. You can probably run 80-90% of workloads on AWS Lambda nowadays. Looking superficially at your idea, I don't see a reason why you couldn't go Serverless. I would also use AWS API Gateway to interface HTTP requests with Lambda. That would be my primary choice.

I don't know if it would be possible, but maybe you can use API Gateway as a proxy to the Github API directly. You can transform incoming requests to match Github specs, and also customize responses to the clients commenting.

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katiekodes profile image
Katie • Edited

I personally would never start with a "free" solution that asks for my credit card.

That way, "painful" is only performance degradation or service cutoff, not money out of pocket!

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shair profile image
Shair

How can I create my custom email with my domain if I am using Vercel?

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nicco88 profile image
Nicco

You may check Zoho mail, it should be free up to 5 users if I'm not wrong.

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

You re right, we can create Zoho mail for our own domain

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vasilisplavos profile image
Vasilis Plavos

You can connect unlimited business emails to your gmail account for free.

Check here: plavos.com/articles/how-to-create-...

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

the custom email will be only provided by email providers. You can use a custom domain to your static site

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stackdiary profile image
Alex Ivanovs • Edited

I just published an extensive article on this topic,

stackdiary.com/free-hosting-for-de...

All with up-to-date research.

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randall72096766 profile image
RandallArmstrong • Edited

Thanks for sharing the amazing information with us. If you want to build a personal website then It’s very much useful for your future business.

There is multiple free hosting company available in the market for developers. They are also good but not for long-term business. Everyone wants to expand business with the best and popular web hosting company.

You can go with free web hosting then you can get limited features and plans. Now, DomainRacer is the greatest and mind-blowing hosting option because they are offering various plans at a very reasonable cost.

DomainRacer launched a recent Free ranking SEO tool, the name is “SEO Default”. This tool is used to optimize your page with the highest quality. And also rank your page on the top of google with the extra amount of traffic.

You need to pick hosting that has different server data locations. DomainRacer provides 7+ server locations like India, UK, USA, Germany, France, Singapore, and Canada.

I am really happy with DomainRacer web hosting services.

Thank You..!

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vasilisplavos profile image
Vasilis Plavos

Have anyone try deta.sh? I try it once just for fun. They promise that hosting is free forever.

They have 3 types of services:

  1. Micros. For Python or Node.js apps
  2. Base. For unlimited NoSQL database
  3. Drive. For cloud storage (10GB for free)

As I have understand their idea is that developers can build apps (for Deta Space) that the users will run them independent.

That means that a developer with build a CMS, user that want the CMS will deploy it with one click on Deta Space. After some years, user decide to stop using the CMS, in that case he/she has the ability to kill the application.

No bad, right? Any thoughts?

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Bayu Angora

How to host on Surge via mobile?

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

Where's your website code, in PC or mobile?

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Bayu Angora

My code is on GitHub repo.

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

Use netlify to host from github

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bayuangora profile image
Bayu Angora

Yes, I use Vercel, Render, Netlify, etc. But I just curious if I can use Surge via mobile too.

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

If it is possible to use the terminal in your mobile, you can serve through surge.sh.

$npm install --global surge

Then
$ surge
it.

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mattdark profile image
Mario García

Thanks for sharing. You could also add GitLab Pages

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

Will add.Thanks for sharing!

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williamxlr

Very nice post, thanks for consolidate it!

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

SHARE !

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ajkachnic profile image
Andrew

I think GCP offers a small VPS forever as part of their free plan. And a basic plan on the PaaS of Azure or GCP is also free forever!

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Anibal

TrincheraDev.com free hosting for WordPress ;)

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wtphilip profile image
Philip Wels

Hi Sasidharan, thanks for compiling this insightful list. Stormkit is missing on this list.

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tryagain profile image
Mohamed M.

Firebase and Azure have forever free web hosting.
Azure recently released a static website service on top of the classic one.

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sasicodes profile image
Sasidharan

oh COOL

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jmacc profile image
jmacc

Thanks for they información. 🤝

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amanwaa profile image
Aman Singh

some great names are missing from the list. please update list and add few more free hosting just like GoogieHost, 000webhost.

GoogieHost URL: googiehost.com/
000webhost - 000webhost.com