If you are a developer and you are working on a project that needs hosting you can opt for one of many free solutions that offer you the basics, and sometimes even more to get you started.
Many sites have free plans for personal projects or experiments, others offer free trials of several months or up to a year, and still others simply limit the amount of resources available to non-paying customers. Anyway, here you go eight solutions that could be of great help.
GitLab Pages
GitLab Pages offers a free plan forever for individual users that includes free static websites. It offers 5 GB of storage and 10 GB of transfers per month. They also have a limit of 400 CI/CD minutes per month, and five users per namespace.
All GitLab plans offer unlimited private repositories and, it is important to mention that CI/CD minutes for public projects created after July 17, 2021 are capped at 50,000 minutes on the free plan.
GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages is undoubtedly one of the best known, its free plan for individuals and organizations it’s also lifetime and includes unlimited public and private repositories. GitHub also offers five times more CI/CD minutes per month: up to 2,000 for public repositories. These also receive 500 MB of package storage
With GitHub Pages you can also create one website per account or organization, and you have unlimited project sites.
Netlify
Netflix is a very good choice for personal projects, hobbies or experiments. Their ‘Starter’ plan offers only one member access, but they give you up to 100GB per month of bandwidth. They offer you 300 minutes per month of ‘Build minutes’, unlimited websites, and up to a thousand active users who can authenticate with your site or app without the need for accounts in other services.
Heroku
On Heroku they also offer a couple of free plans called ‘Free’ and ‘Hobby’ free for non-commercial applications such as proofs of concept, MVPs, and personal projects. The ‘Free’ account offers 512 MB of RAM, custom domains, up to two process types, and between 550 and 1,000 “dyno hours” per ms.
On Heroku, they run your applications in lightweight, isolated Linux containers that they call “dynos.” The platform offers different types of those ‘dynos’ for different cases. The ‘Hobby’ plan offers everything in the ‘Free’ plan, but adds extras and charges for each dyno. As well they offer other services like Heroku Postgres and Heroku Redis that also have free plans.
Azure
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud, also has an initial free plan. This includes free services for 12 months and a free credit of 200 dollars Americans. After the credit you can have another 40 services free forever, and change to monthly payment for use.
The platform offers free trials of all kinds of experiences for building mobile apps, websites, scalable workloads, hybrid environments, and more.
AWS
The free tier of Amazon Web Services or AWS includes three different types of offers depending on the product used. These offers are limited to 12 months of free use. What they offer varies a lot depending on what you are going to use the platform for.
Amazon has product categories for analytics, application integration, computing, containers, databases, web and mobile frontend services, machine learning, storage, serverless, etc.
Firebase
Firebase is Google’s platform that in its Spark Plan includes a good number of products at no cost. These include hosting with up to 10 GB of storage and 360 MB of data transfers per day.
You can use custom domain and SSL, have multiple sites per project, and they also give you 5 GB in Google Cloud with thousands of upload and download operations per day. You can find more information on the Firebase support page.
Render
In Render they offer a free plan for static websites which supports custom domains with TLS and unlimited collaborators. With Render free plans, you can create PostgreSQL databases and web services at no cost.
Each service is allowed up to 100 GB/month of outgoing bandwidth (network traffic sent by your code). Usage above that amount is charged at $0.10/GB. Inbound bandwidth (network traffic received by your code) is always free.