When getting an idea to make an application, especially a website, generally people will create a website locally on their respective computers using XAMPP or other.
But when the site that has been created wants to upload to hosting or deploy, you must first consider whether this website is ready to rent paid hosting or not. The goal is that the application that you have created can be accessed by many people.
Currently, this can be minimized by using several free hosting services to try it live, before you are sure and steady to use a paid hosting service or cloud service.
You can try and learn several free hosting service options available, such as Netlify, 000Webhost, Github Pages, Vercel or Heroku. What is the free hosting service like and how do I use it?
1. Netlify
You can use this service for free or paid, Netlify is a static site hosting service with features offered that you can use.
Netlify does not use FTP like shared hosting, but Netlify uses Git to deploy on the website.
Thus, before using Netlify, you should learn about Git first, you can use the services of github, gitlab, bitbucket etc. or you can use the drag and drop feature.
Also, Netlify provides other features like DNS, SSL etc. Try using the free package first to use the free hosting in Netlify, if you are interested in Netlify, you can use the paid version.
How to use the Netlify service:
- Create an account first
- Upload files into Netlify can use Git or Drag and Drop, wait until the process is complete.
- Wait until the status changes to published, which means the website is ready to be published.
- Fast enough it doesn't need to take long.
2. Github Pages
What are Github Pages? Github Pages is a free static site hosting service provided by Github.com to display sites live.
Github itself is like a social media for software engineer developers around the world, where developers can share their projects, collaborate with other developers, share ideas, share code, and more.
Static Site itself is a website that only uses HTML, CSS, JS, Images that do not require compiling to run it, in other words, Github Pages cannot use databases such as MySQL, Postgree to store data because Github does not provide it, and also server side code such as PHP, Ruby, Python can't run either on Github Pages.
Common advantages of Github Pages include, no need for server setup, guaranteed security and fast deployment.
How to use the Github Pages service:
- Create a Github account first on github.com
- Create a repository to hold your code.
- Place the index.html file in front of the root directory.
- After everything has been met, Github will usually deploy automatically, try checking by opening the settings in the repository and looking in the Github Pages section.
3. 000webhost
Another free hosting service that you can use is to use the 000Webhost service from hostinger.
After you have finished creating a website on your localhost computer and want to try to make the site live for free, you can try this service as your choice before trying the full service in paid hosting.
The advantages of this 000webhost service are that there are no ads, no strict requirements, and the cool thing is this service supports server side programming such as PHP and databases, in other words if you create applications using native PHP or PHP frameworks such as Codeigniter, Laravel for try the PHP project that you have created, you can try this free service.
Other features offered are:
- 250MB for data storage.
- 100 GB for bandwidth
- Supports cURL, GD, Zend extensions
- PHP and MySQL
- And others.
You can also use the paid 000webhost service if you want to use other full features
How to use 000webhost service:
Create an account first
- After the account is created and successfully verified
- Then add a new website by clicking the + button then fill in the website name and password form. Save the website name and password to a notepad or other so you don't forget it when logging in.
- When finished, enter the file manager to manage the data you want to upload to the 000webhost server in the public_html folder
- Then try to access the website by adding a subdomain with your website name with 000webhost.com Ex: https://mywebsite.000webhost.com
4. Vercel
Vercel is a free static site-based hosting service, very suitable for CV/resume purposes, personal portfolios, personal profiles and others that do not require server-side, but if you want to use data, currently there is API technology to retrieve data from databases and display it in your static website.
You can immediately deploy quickly with this Vercel service, you can also import a repository in git to deploy it.
To use this Vercel service, you must have a Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket account.
How to use Vercel services:
- Once you have a Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket account
- Download the Vercel CLI Application via NPM, run the npx vercel -v command to find out if the application status is successful or not.
- Login via the Vercel CLI via the npx vercel command then enter the registered email.
- After everything is done with verifying your email, you can already use Vercel services
- Upload your static website file into vercel by using the npx vercel command in your project folder. with the name index.html at the beginning of the root directory.
- Wait until the process is complete, and holo... your website is live.
- Find the URL of the live website in production: https://namawebsite.vercel.app (example)
- Done
Vercel has website support using React, Next.Js, Vue.
5. Heroku
Heroku is a cloud computing-based service that provides PaaS (Platform as a Service). In other words, Heroku has everything ready and ready to go.
Users only focus on deployment without having to think about infrastructure. Heroku is basically almost the same as CPanel, but the difference is in how to deploy it.
You can use this free service on Heroku which hosts website data for free, either static websites or dynamic websites.
What you need is the Git application on your computer, please first download the Git software on your computer. This is required to deploy the application to Heroku.
How to use Heroku service:
- Register an account first on the official Heroku website and activate your email.
- Prepare the code to be deployed, Heroku supports server side such as Node.js, PHP, Ruby etc.
- Login to Heroku to deploy, please open a terminal in your text editor such as VS Code, and run the command in the VS Code terminal.
- Change the directory into your project folder, and fill in the heroku login command to point the browser into the Heroku CLI
- When finished, close the browser, do the heroku create command to create a new project.
- Push the project to Heroku by entering the command git add . and to deploy it with the command git push heroku master
- Until there, the site is already hosted and automatically deployed to Heroku.
6. InfinityFree
InfinityFree can be a free web hosting alternative that you can try, infinityfree is popular because it has a good design so that it makes users give a positive impression of this free hosting service from InfinityFree.
InfinityFree has been in the hosting business for approximately 6 years, and he has claimed that he has more than 500,000 active users with unlimited disk and bandwidth offerings, even though there is a daily hit limit of 50,000 but that number is quite large.
To spread your website with InfinityFree, you are given free space by getting 10 email accounts and 1 FTP account to deploy the source code of your website. InfinityFree guarantees 99.9% uptime and gets the popular Softaculous. We were quite surprised because InfinityFree offers several other interesting features including:
- Can cover 400 MySQL databases
- Free SSL
- Free DNS
- Free Cloudflare CDN
Quite satisfying and impressive for a free service.
Conclusion
The convenience of realizing digital ideas is now very easy, before using paid services and using other full features, there are many hosting services provided for free that you can use as much as possible to make your project perfect.
