FREE Hosting!
"Free hosting" used to be a punchline — the kind of service that splattered banner ads across your site and quietly oversold its servers. In 2023 the picture is wildly different. Modern free-tier hosting is good enough that most small-business and portfolio sites should start there. Here is a practical map of what to use, and when.
Static sites: Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel
If your site is HTML/CSS/JS (a marketing page, a blog, a portfolio, a documentation site), all three of these are genuinely free and very fast:
- Cloudflare Pages — generous bandwidth, the fastest global edge, the simplest custom-domain flow. My personal default.
- Netlify — best DX (deploy previews, form handling, identity) but the bandwidth cap (100 GB/month) is real if you go viral.
- Vercel — best Next.js integration, slightly more aggressive paid wall on serverless functions.
Dynamic apps: Render, Railway, Fly.io free tiers
If you need a real backend, things get nuancier. The honest tradeoffs:
- Render — free static services and a small free PostgreSQL. Background workers cost money.
- Railway — generous one-off credit, but no permanent free tier anymore.
- Fly.io — free three shared CPUs plus 3 GB volume. Best for hobby-scale APIs.
WordPress and cPanel: Hostinger, InfinityFree, 000webhost
If you want classic shared hosting (FTP, MySQL, one-click WordPress) for free:
- Hostinger free plan — trial-style, but useful for a quick demo.
- InfinityFree — genuinely permanent free, but only basic PHP/MySQL.
- 000webhost — surprisingly stable, with daily downtime windows. Fine for hobby sites.
The catch nobody mentions
Free hosting is free in money but expensive in portability. The platforms differentiate on edge functions, environment variables, build pipelines and proprietary extensions. The more you lean into the free-tier-specific features, the harder it gets to leave when you outgrow the tier.
Mitigation: keep the application logic platform-agnostic (containerised or framework-standard) and treat the platform-specific bits as thin glue.
Recommendation by use-case
| If you need… | Use |
|---|---|
| A portfolio or static blog | Cloudflare Pages |
| A Next.js marketing site | Vercel |
| A WordPress prototype | InfinityFree or 000webhost |
| A hobby API | Fly.io |
| A small SaaS that might grow | Render free + Supabase free |
You don't need to spend a dollar to ship a real product in 2023. You just need to pick the right free tier — and make sure you can leave it cleanly when the bills finally start.