So cool to see all the different free services out there for getting in to web dev. I remember having to do graphic design work growing up to afford a shared hosting plan on my mom's credit card. Times have definitely changed :D<p>Lately I've been enjoying KubeSail's (<a href="https://kubesail.com/" rel="nofollow">https://kubesail.com/</a>) free tier for playing around with some SSR things. A lot of the lambda like services don't do great with doing realtime stuff since they're just meant to run one piece of code then die a few seconds later
Great list. My personal choice is Netlify.<p>With Netlify Functions and FaunaDB (also with a generous free tier), I have a full stack web app, complete with a database, hosted for free (<a href="https://www.quidsentio.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.quidsentio.com</a>)
It's worth pointing out that most (if not all) the options listed are only free to a certain point.<p>Netlify and Github Pages, for example, are capped at 100 GB of bandwidth per month. It's a very generous cap and ample for most use cases, but something to keep in mind as your projects gain traction.
We've been using AWS Amplify and it's been pretty nice. It allows pairing with Github and deployments by branches. CI Integrations are not that great, like Slack bots and stuff, but it gets the job done as a good place to deploy code. The free-tier is fairly generous, and it's nice that everything lives in AWS (if you're already using them for other things)<p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/console/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/console/</a>
I used Vercel for the first time last week and the time between creating a repo to have a Next site publicly deployed was minutes. A custom domain was a couple minutes more. I was gobsmacked, this is something that took me weeks four years ago.
Great list, I'm glad to see the number of options increasing.<p>This reminded me of one of my projects, <a href="http://hasgluten.com" rel="nofollow">http://hasgluten.com</a>, kind of forgotten but still up & running on github pages since I learned react 6y ago.<p>Code is here for the archeologists: <a href="https://github.com/hasgluten/hasgluten" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hasgluten/hasgluten</a>
I don't recommend Github Pages as they have issues with routing.<p>Read this [1] for workarounds but it's more than annoying to work around instead of just using a better hosting solution.<p>Personally I have only ever tried GH Pages and Netlify had no issues at all with Netlify.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/rafgraph/spa-github-pages" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rafgraph/spa-github-pages</a>
What's the point of using those services over uploading the app files into a directory that is served by any webserver?<p>>Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.<p>Apart from the CDN, that's all available for e.g. Digital Ocean Droplets. But why would a CDN be needed for static websites?
Netlify is one of the best services my team uses. It does exactly what you expect it to do and then gets the fuck out of your way. I love it!<p>They also have smart features baked right in like pre-rendering. Literally hit a checkbox and you're prerendering.
It is fantastic how far we have gotten. I had a web in Geocities before the Yahoo purchase. It allowed 150 Kilobytes of storage and no CGI (Common Gateway Interface).<p>I do no see mention of size limits in the article. I just checked Firebase and the free tier allows up to 1 GiB total.<p>Security is the other change. To run CGI allowed control of too much for any provider to be comfortable with it. Containerization and overall Operating System improvements allow for server-side code with safety (Spectre aside).<p>Great article and great opportunity for anyone that wants to start small on the cloud.
I have always disliked services like netlify or vercel. Sure it seems nice with free hosting but in reality it's quite limiting and often it's cheaper to host on a $5 DO droplet or some similar vps offering. Also, with those kind of services that are free, soon gets very expensive as soon as you leave the free tier.<p>With a vps, you can do front and backend and host hundreds of low traffic websites.<p>I don't really understand what type of developer only does front end work or where do you host your backend stuff whjen you use Vercel / Netlify?
Great list! Thank you for putting this together. Highly appreciated. What about way 9: <a href="https://stormkit.io" rel="nofollow">https://stormkit.io</a>?
Very nice free service list. I think it could been added a way of running node CLI’s without installation through npx instead of installing global packages.
I use Netlify for <a href="https://expose.sh" rel="nofollow">https://expose.sh</a><p>It's configured to auto deploy from GitHub every time I merge to the "master" branch.<p>Works pretty well for my static site and it's free because I'm a solo founder therefore there's only one team member.
This is kind of Off-topic, but I've been getting back to doing web development for the past few months. One thing I've been surprised is how much high quality content marketing/blogs there are especially regarding React.<p>The Logrocket blog is an excellent example of this. Lots of useful blog posts. Another one I've been relying on is the blog of Robin Wieruch [1].<p>I guess stating this is a little obvious, but one of the upsides of using popular tools is the productivity boost you get from the surrounding ecosystem.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.robinwieruch.de/blog" rel="nofollow">https://www.robinwieruch.de/blog</a>