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Rishab Kumar
Rishab Kumar

Posted on • Updated on

How to host your website for free - Part 1

This is a three part series.

In this article, I'll walk you through one way that you can take your site and host it on your own server.

Step 1: Linux server or a VM.

You'll need shell access to your server/VM. I would recommend micro instance in Google Cloud and if you are new you can almost get $300 in Google Cloud Credits. Also check out their free tier. You can also use a t2.micro instance in AWS, they offer free tier too. In this guid I will show how you can get a free linux instance:

You will get $300 credit to play around with for a year! It is more than enough to learn and play with everything Google Cloud offers.
(⚠ You will need to provide a credit card even if registering for free tier)

Step 1: Create new project:

After creating your account, create new projext where you will launch your resources, in our case, its a VM instance.
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Step 2: Create a VM instance:

After the project is created, click on the little hamburger on top left side, and go down to Compute Engine and select VM intances
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Click on create instance.
After that, please choose the following settings for your VM:
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If you scroll down, you will see the Firewall settings for your intance, check on both:

  • Allow HTTP
  • Allow HTTPS Alt Text

Then click create!

Step 3: Connect to the VM instance:

Wait for the instance to launch.
Once the instance has launched click on the SSH button and it should open a new tab with shell access to your Linux instance.
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You will also notice there is a public IP address assigned to your instance, take note of it, as this is where we will point our domain for our website.


Other cloud providers:


Please hit the 🖤 if it was helpful!

Top comments (1)

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alexlion profile image
Alex Lion

It's not free, you need free credit and a new account.