Static websites are web pages with fixed content and its constant. But now static sites also handle dynamic data using APIs and queries.
Applications that provide data for frontend through REST API are backend applications. Some of the free hosting providers for your backend were also mentioned below.
Hosting all these applications to cloud for the public access to prototype our idea, showing to friends, colleagues, reach audience during development needs someplace to host and we can't afford high hosting prices during prototype or in development.
Here's the list of free application hosting providers,
Netlify - https://www.netlify.com
Easy deploy by dropping your site folder or link your repository for auto-build and auto-publish on commit. An intuitive Git-based workflow and powerful serverless platform to build, deploy, and collaborate on web apps
DomainRacer - https://www.domainracer.in
{Fly With => Faster + Affordable Hosting}
DomainRacer is one of the affordable web hosting for developers that users want to select. All cheap web hosting plans are packed with mind-blowing features as a free SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, free weekly JetBackup, free premium SEO tool, free security tools, unlimited data transfer, 99.99% uptime, LiteSpeed cache technology, unlimited customer support and more.
Github Pages - https://pages.github.com
Hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.
Vercel - https://vercel.com
Host static sites, JAMstack, and auto-deploy on commit. Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance.
Render - https://render.com
In Render, we can host static sites and also backend part (adds pricing). Also, auto builds and publishes from a commit. Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.
Surge - https://surge.sh
Simple, single-command web publishing. Publish HTML, CSS, and JS for free, without leaving the command line.
Tiiny Host - https://tiiny.host
The simplest way to host & share your web project.
Cheap services
Heroku - https://www.heroku.com
The cloud service provider offers up to 500 MB of hosting storage for personal projects and we can host all kinds of applications.
Amazon S3 - https://aws.amazon.com/s3
It provides static site hosting with objects stored in it. It's free for a limited amount of requests and also based on CRUD operation on objects. Check their site for full information.
Azure and GCP
Similar to AWS, azure and google cloud provides site hosting services. Check documentation for the free pricing limit.
From comments section,
GitLab - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages
Firebase - https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting
Stromkit - https://www.stormkit.io/
All these providers support the custom domain.
The above list is only a few service providers and you guys feel free to add more to this that you used recently.
Thanks.
Disclaimer: Please go through the website to learn more about their services before use.
Top comments (47)
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.)
I’m slowly getting into Gatsby, I think I like the idea of it but I am not convinced yet.
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.)
Why WYSIWYG static site CMS’s love Gatsby
Katie ・ Jun 24 ・ 8 min read
Firebase also offers a free hosting service 😉
I use firebase for hosting my portfolio site & I love it so far.
Cool! No costs? What’s the stack? I pay like $10 a month for years now.
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.
Use your preferred stack like JAM, react site, gatsby, or any static site generators and also single page application builds.
Cool!
Forgot to add!:)
Will add.Thanks for sharing!
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.
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?
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):
A little over $3 for 1 Million requests per month.
And that's for you to have:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
How can I create my custom email with my domain if I am using Vercel?
You can connect unlimited business emails to your gmail account for free.
Check here: plavos.com/articles/how-to-create-...
You may check Zoho mail, it should be free up to 5 users if I'm not wrong.
You re right, we can create Zoho mail for our own domain
the custom email will be only provided by email providers. You can use a custom domain to your static site
I just published an extensive article on this topic,
stackdiary.com/free-hosting-for-de...
All with up-to-date research.
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..!
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:
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?
How to host on Surge via mobile?
Where's your website code, in PC or mobile?
My code is on GitHub repo.
Use netlify to host from github
Yes, I use Vercel, Render, Netlify, etc. But I just curious if I can use Surge via mobile too.
If it is possible to use the terminal in your mobile, you can serve through surge.sh.
$npm install --global surge
Then
$ surge
it.
TrincheraDev.com free hosting for WordPress ;)
Hi Sasidharan, thanks for compiling this insightful list. Stormkit is missing on this list.