Hi! If you are a developer, and you are working on a project that needs hosting, you can opt for one of the many free solutions that offer you the basics. On the other hand, many sites have free plans for personal projects or experiments. Others simply limit the number of resources available to non-paying customers. Anyway, today I am going to show you The best services offering free hosting for your websites, applications, or experiments
GitLab Pages
GitLab Pages offers a free forever plan 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 minutes per month of CI/CD, and five users per namespace.
On the other hand, all GitLab plans offer unlimited private repositories. Additionally, CI/CD minutes for public projects created on or 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. In fact, its free plan for individuals and organizations is also lifetime and includes unlimited public and private repositories. GitHub also offers five times more CI/CD minutes per month: up to 2000 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
Netflify is an excellent choice for personal projects, hobbies, or experiments. Their ‘Starter’ plan offers only access to one member, but they give you up to 100 GB per month of bandwidth. They offer 300 minutes per month of ‘Build minutes’, unlimited websites, and up to 1,000 active users. These users can authenticate with your site or app without needing accounts on other services.
Heroku
Heroku also offers a couple of free plans called Free and Hobby. These no-cost plans are for non-commercial applications such as proof-of-concepts, 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.
In Heroku they run your application in isolated, lightweight Linux containers which they call dynos. The platform offers different types of these dynos for different cases. The ‘Hobby’ plan offers everything in the ‘Free’ plan, but adds extras and charges per dyno. They also offer other services such as Heroku Postgres and Heroku Redis which 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 US$200. After the credit, you can have another 40 free services forever, and switch to monthly pay-as-you-go.
The platform offers free trials of all types of experiences for building mobile apps, websites, scalable workloads, hybrid environments and more.
AWS
The Amazon Web Services or AWS free tier includes three different types of offers depending on the product used. These offers are limited to 12 months of free usage. What they offer varies greatly 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 technology, etc.
Firebase
Firebase is Google’s platform that in its Spark Plan includes a good number of products at no cost. Among these are 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
At Render, they offer a free plan for static websites that supports custom domains with TLS and unlimited contributors. With Render’s free plans, you can create web services and PostgreSQL databases at no cost.
Each service is allowed up to 100 GB/month of outbound 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.
Kamatera
Starting at $4 per month, you get 1 GB of RAM, 20 GB of SDD storage and 5 TB of network traffic. Kamatera offers you the choice of Nodejs version and data center location.
Launchpad
Another great alternative is Launchpad, the software hosting and version control platform of Canonical, the organization responsible for Ubuntu Linux. This platform hosts the codes of open-source developments of the likes of Ubuntu. However, it also hosts others such as Inkscape, Shutter or OpenShot Video Editor. In total, more than 40,000 projects. In addition to version control and Wiki, Launchpad facilitates tasks such as code review, bug search and resolution, internal mailing lists…
Google Cloud Source Repositories
Under the name Google Cloud, there is a whole catalog of services and products related to online storage and other professional tasks related to the Internet. And one of its products is Cloud Source Repositories, its platform where you can host your software based on the Git version controller.
In addition to offering free space (up to 50 GB) to create private and public repositories, you can migrate your content from other similar services such as GitHub. Additional services such as error analysis, code testing in the cloud, etc., are also available.
SourceForge
SourceForge may be one of the oldest software platforms, and although it has seen better times, it is still there. It currently has more than 430,000 projects and more than 3.7 million registered users.
Among other things, it allows hosting open source and commercial software, offers download statistics, integrates tools such as mailing lists, forums and blogs, is compatible with Git, but also with Mercurial and Subversion, etc.
Another of its outstanding features is that it is very useful for developers because it makes it easy to download software from different servers. In addition, millions of users can search for applications and download them, making it a good showcase for little-known software.
Very well, in this way we have seen The best services offering free hosting for your websites, applications, or experiments. See you!
