Web hosting allows individuals and organizations to post a website or web page onto the internet. Websites are hosted or stored on special computers called servers, where all your files and supporting tools reside. When a user searches for your website on the internet, the server fetches and populates your webpage. However, the hosting services give you more than hosting facilities, like personal email account, FTP access, storage space, Wordpress support, etc. These web hosting services charge you according to the number of features you buy from there for your business.
The startups or websites that are simple; their best alternative is free website hosting. There are many free hosting services. But before we discuss them in detail, let's see the types of hosting one can use. Free hosting is also suitable for people who want to study the end-users reactions before they release the final version of paid services.
The most common type of hosting you will come across are shared, dedicated, managed, and VPS. There is one more type of hosting that is immensely getting popular among website owners is Cloud hosting.
Cloud hosting has few reasons for its increasing popularity,
- Flexible pricing
- Super scalable
- Incredible uptime and performance
- Developer friendly
Best Free Cloud Hosting Services
1) Amazon Web Services (AWS):
AWS or Amazon’s premier cloud web service is segmented into three products: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Beanstalk, and Lightsail. The EC2 is a free tier, and users can have complete access to it with their limited resources. The micro instance that comes with the free tier can run either Linux or Windows and is fit for low to moderate performance needs. A user with access to the AWS Free Tier can use up to 750 instance hours each of t2.micro instances running Linux and Windows.
The Free Tier has three different types of offerings,
- 12-month Free Tier
- Always Free offer
- Short term trials
2) Heroku:
Heroku is designed for developers to create and deploy projects quickly and free. It uses the container model to handle its apps, and the containers are called “dynos.” A dyno is an instance of your application running and responding to requests. The free dyno will provide you 512 MB of RAM and 2 process types. Heroku provides, for free, 1 dyno. There is one pain-point for Heroku; if a free dyno isn’t accessed frequently, it goes into sleep mode. However, their Beta version is taking care of the sleep mode features. Here are the details about the Heroku dyno.
( Image source: devcenter.heroku)
3) Google Compute Engine (GCE):
Google free cloud hosting is the best option, but you need to be in the United States to get the most out of it. Their F1 micro instance provides 30 GB of storage space, 1 vCPU, 5 GB of snapshot storage,0.6 GB of RAM, and 1 GB of bandwidth. The f1-micro instance is free until you have used a number of hours equal to the total hours in the current month. You can host WordPress on Google Cloud free forever, which simply requires doing a new installation at the end of each year. Also, Google cloud allows using some high-end technology for free.
4) Microsoft Azure
The Microsoft Azure free tier has somewhat similar offerings like AWS. Their hosting service that is Web Apps FREE tier offers the following features:
- 1 GB storage space
- ".azurewebsite . net" subdomain
- Remote debugging with Visual Studio debugger
- Support for a range of frameworks or platform- PHP,Java,.NET Framework and Python
- Multiple deployment options
- FTP / FTPS, Web deployment, and deployment from Github repository
- Ability to run background scripts via Web Jobs
- Performance monitoring
- Virtual applications and directories
5) Red Hat Open-shift
The Red hat offers the free starter plan. Their starter plan includes a US-based cloud instance with 4 vCPUs, 2 GB of RAM, and 2 GB of storage space. It is the fastest way for developers to build, deploy, and scale containerized apps in the public cloud. However, the free tier “openshift online” project resources sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity and must sleep 18 hours in a 72 hour period. The cloud hosting can be managed and configured using the command line or through customized consoles developed by Openshift.
