Where to host your web development projects?
Do you know what’s the best place to host your web development projects? or your client’s? well in this article we will discuss some of the best hosting services, most of which are free (with certain limitations) and few paid, which provide amazing premium features that your clients are going to love, so let’s start with:
GitHub Pages
GitHub pages is by far the most well-known free hosting service, provided by GitHub itself — but as it’s free we can’t expect it to be without any limitations, and those limitations are:
- It only hosts public repositories (leaving this service useless for closed-source websites)
- It only lets you host frontend (leaving this service useless for web applications with a backend or database integrated)
a thing I experienced while using GitHub pages is that it’s a bit slow, I don’t know if many people noticed that, but I did, anyways you can use GitHub pages for your small personal projects.
Netlify
Netlify is another free hosting service that also provides premium plans, and it has several benefits over GitHub pages one of which is, it’s a bit fast — while you can’t expect it to be “That fast” in its free version, but still it’s faster than GitHub pages, talking about Netlify, you may have heard about it before, since it has a pretty big community, every developer I have ever met in person has once used Netlify for their projects, making it popular among developers.
I have used Netlify for many of my projects and the experience, even in their free plan was admirable. I would surely recommend you to host your projects on Netlify however you might face some limitation in their free version, you can check their plans and see if it fits in your budget.
Hostinger
There’s a high probability that you have heard Hostinger before, at least for once. Unlike the previous ones, Hostinger isn’t a free hosting service, but it has some of the most advanced features that none other has to offer and they’re worth every penny paid for, there are way too many “Wow” features Hostinger has to offer but here are some I like:
- Increased Performance — you get a blazing fast loading time, resulting in a better user experience.
- Daily Backups — This is something most of the Hosting providers charge you extra for, but Hostinger is generous!
- AI SEO tools — Simple as it sounds! you’re going make your client EXTRA HAPPY for this one!
- Free domain — you heard it right, they provide a free domain in their premium version, making the offer irresistible.
You can read a full list of amazing features Hostinger has to offer here. (please note that this is a referral link)
I would recommend you host your client’s website on this one, and your projects on a free service like Netlify (this will save you lots of money).
Get started with Hostinger (please note that this is a referral link)
Vercel
Vercel is yet another free hosting service with premium features available on paid plans, but this is something I would recommend you to check out, even on Vercel’s free tier you get a bit cooler stuff than usual like:
- Web Analytics — which I don’t any free hosting service provider does.
- Starter Database — While I am not comparing this database with Firebase or Hostinger' s still it’s free and nice to have it.
and there are a few more that you can check here, as always you will face some limitations in their free plan, but still you can save money using Vercel for your personal projects.
Fun fact: The Next.js web development framework is managed by Vercel’s team
Which one do you prefer for your projects and your clients, let us know in the comments, and if you liked my writing and research for you, you can buy me a coffee —
