Building a website is an excellent way to express yourself or brand your business. The question usually comes up though, “Can I host my website for free?” and the answer is yes you can! In this guide we cover how you can do this in various different ways, be it an HTML based website, a blog, or even a dynamic PHP website!
Here are the main ways to host your website for free:
Free Web Hosting Services
Free web hosting services can be a great choice if you are looking to get your website online without spending any money upfront. These types of services offer a basic hosting environment with limited resources, which is typically enough for small scale projects, personal blogs, or when you’re just starting out and want to test the waters. Although using these types of providers means you don’t have to pay for hosting, you often sacrifice on performance, storage space and support as a result. In this comparison article we’ll look more closely at two popular free web hosting providers, 000webhost vs InfinityFree.
000webhost is mostly popular for its easy to setup process. You don’t need to spend any bucks in order to get your website up and running on 000webhost. The free plan comes with 300MB disk space and 3 GB bandwidth which is fair enough for any small scale website. But it doesn’t offer some advanced features like daily backup, email hosting etc also uptime will not be good as the server has some limitations.`Accepting these shortcomings, many people goes with 000webhost when they just want their site up and create a lot of configurations.
while InfinityFree is another free hosting provider that guarantees 5GB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth. With InfinityFree, you can host as many websites as you want (compared to the one-website limit of 000webhost). Unlike other free hosting providers, InfinityFree does not force ads on your site. Nevertheless, keep in mind that the performance of the “unlimited” infrastructure may not be as optimal as premium hosting, and customer service is pretty much non-existent.
Website Builders
Website builders like WordPress.com, Wix, and Weebly offer free hosting as well as easy tools to create and customize websites. They’re great for bloggers and personal sites since you don’t need knowledge of coding to construct one. The only caveat is that their branding will often be on your site like “Powered by WordPress” or “Built by Wix,” which doesn’t look too professional, and there are design limitations to what you can do with the builder on a free plan.
Self-Hosting on a Local Server
If you’re not happy with the restrictions of free web hosting services or website builders, then you can go for self-hosting on a local server (localhost). This way you have full control over your website’s environment and it can be as simple as your Android phone with apps like Termux. And it’s cost effective too as you utilize your own device resources to host your site. You can follow this step by step tutorial Creating A PHP Self Hosting Server On Android.
GitHub
You can actually host your website for free on GitHub! GitHub Pages lets you turn a GitHub repository into a free static website suited for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. It has some limitations 500MB of storage per repository and isn’t built to host large binary files or sites needing server-side features (e.g., PHP). But it’s perfect if you’re a developer working on small projects or need a personal portfolio site.
Conclusion
Of all the four mentioned, the best way is to self-host on a local server. In this way you have control over storage, performance and environment settings and everything works on your own resources locally. Though option 1, 2 and 4 similar issues like branding limitation, storage limitations and performance issues respectively but self-hosting can easily handle most of these things effortlessly only thing is that please backup your project timely to secure cloud storage e.g. Google Drive otherwise data loss will be a concern.
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