There are a lot of hosting providers out there but only a few of them are free, and as somehow who's just starting, the last thing you want to hear is payment for hosting providers to host your portfolio website or side projects. In this article I'll be going through the top 5 free hosting providers you can start using today.
1. Netlify
This is by far one of the best and easiest hosting providers to set up out there. You can publish your site directly from a Github repository or even using git. It offers support for Jamstack which helps in building faster, more secure, and easy-to-scale websites. It also has a feature called forms which lets you manage the submission of forms without any server-side code or JavaScript. Other features it provides include HTTPS, split testing, deploy previews which allow you to see what changes will look like on the live site, rollbacks, and more.
2. Vercel
Another great one with tons of features is Vercel. It offers the ability to import from any git repositories whether it's Github, Bitbucket, or GitLab, and even from third-party repositories. Its free (hobby) plan offers unlimited deployment of websites and APIs and since the developers of Vercel built Next.js, it's optimized and offers all Next.js templates for easier build. Other features it offers include HTTPS-enabled custom domains, a High-performance edge network, and serverless functions in Node.js, Go, and many more languages and frameworks.
3. Github Pages
This is the easiest and fastest way to publish your site because it's part of Github itself. All you need to do is go to your repository settings and activate it and your site is live. You can also plug in your custom domain. It also supports Jekyll which makes it easier to create blogs using markdown support. When you publish your site, it comes with a .github.io subdomain but you can change it with your custom domain.
4. Heroku
This platform is a bit more advanced because it focuses on companies that build enterprise software and are looking to scale over time. It's a part of salesforce so it's tightly integrated with the Salesforce data synchronization for full-cycle CRM engagement. Its free plan offers Git and Docker support, container orchestration, and automatic OS patching.
5. Render
This is another great hosting provider with some great features such as Lightning-fast CDN, Continuous deployment with Git, SSL domains, and 100GB of monthly bandwidth.
Bonus
Neocities
They call themselves "the social network of websites that are bringing back lost individual creativity of the web". It's 100% free and open-source with tons of great features such as an in-browser HTML editor, file upload, RSS feeds, folder support, and command-line tools.
These aren't the only free hosting providers out there but these are the best available. There are a ton of other free hosting providers but none of them offer this amount of features for free. You can check them all out and decide which one you prefer and go with it.
Happy Coding!!!