You know the frustration when you have a portfolio or a simple hobby project or even a commercial project with very low traffic but you have to pay at least $5 a month to a hosting company to host it. I mean $5 is not much but still, why pay when you don’t have to?
Netlify
Netlify is one of the most unique hosting providers in the world. It was probably one of the first companies that pushed for Continuous Deployment. The ability to simply write code, push it to GitHub and have it live in a few minutes is pretty mind-blowing. It takes all the pain out of managing servers, you can just focus on building the product and Netlify will handle the rest. It also provinces many free services alongside hosting like serverless functions, user identity management, and media transformations.
Free Plan
- 100GB bandwidth / month
- 125k functions invocations per month per site
- 300 build minutes
Limitations
- Only hosts static sites which means we can’t run a server-rendered application like WordPress.
Features
- Directly deploy from GitHub repository
- Rollback to any deploy
- Automatic CDN
- NextJS 12 support
- Serverless functions
Cloudflare Pages
People seem to be unaware of the fact that Cloudflare (known for its CDN service) also provides a free hosting solution for static sites. And their free plan is pretty generous all things considered.
Free Plan
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 100k Functions per day
- 500 Builds per day
Limitations
- Only hosts static sites.
Features
- Directly deploy from GitHub repository
- Rollback to any deploy
- Automatic CDN
Vercel
Vercel is probably the first choice of many open source and non-commercial projects. And we must say, they absolutely deserve all the love and praise they get from the community. But since you can’t host any commercial project there (not even a small one) unless you pay $20/month, it loses a point on this list. But their plans are extremely generous compared to the competition, especially their $20/month plan which blows Netlify out of the water.
Free Plan
- Bandwidth: 100GB / Month
- Functions: Unlimited invocations
- Build Minutes: 6,000
Limitations
- Doesn’t host dynamic sites like WordPress
- Doesn’t allow commercial websites on Free plan
Features
- Full NextJS Support
- Directly deploy from GitHub repository
- Rollback to any deploy
- Automatic CDN
Oracle Cloud
When compared to the companies on this list Oracle Cloud is a totally different beast. It is more in line with companies like AWS and Azure than Netlify and Vercel. Oracle Cloud provides a plethora of services that you can use for free for all kinds of applications. But since it competes with AWS, it is way more complex than others in this list. As a result, it could be difficult to figure out for beginners. But once you get past that you can pretty much host anything on this.
Free Plan
- Unlimited bandwidth
- 2 AMD based Compute VMs and 1 GB memory each
- 4 Arm-based cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs
- 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total
- Two databases total, each with 20 GB storage.
Limitations
- None. But could be difficult to set up for beginners