Switching up my side project hosting in search of savings $$
So, by day I’m a full time geek and software engineer at Boston Consulting Group.
By night, I’m sometimes a geek too, with side projects and web apps that need hosting. None of these are income generating, many are half-baked things I wanted to try out, so I don’t want to have spend money on them, or at least more than I have to.
TL;DR: the stack
If you, like me, want articles to cut to the chase, here’s what I’m going with my stack for various needs of hosting:
- Domains, SSL, email forwarding
- Cloudflare: free tier SSL, rock-bottom prices for domain name registration - Git Repos:
- GitHub, duh - Front end hosting
- Using Netlify, sometimes use GitHub pages (but doesn’t allow routing)
- Intrigued by / want to try: Cloudflare Pages, Vercel - Backend (typically NodeJS, Apollo GraphQL) — may update soon
- Broken-hearted that Heroku no longer allowing free tier
- Looking into Netlify Functions, Cloudflare Functions, Glitch.com, Deno
—
Domains, SSL, and Hosting.
For many moons (since 2009!) I have been using 1and1.com (now called IONOS) for my simple web hosting, back when I had just learned PHP and had a few sites for friends and family to host while I was learning. This was solid, came with a free domain, simple ssh login with (s)ftp access and unlimited(!) storage. Great for young Max getting started in the hosting world. This became not enough when I started working in NodeJS; the made-for-ruby-and-php hosting slice was not capable of NodeJS. It is also $9.99 / month. Also they charge extra for SSL, which is now more-or-less a requirement for all websites. Given there are so many free hosting options out there, I wanted to look into other options and save $120 per year!
I first came across Cloudflare because I was looking for a free simple way to get SSL HTTPS on my domains. It has a great free hobbyist tier, and an easy UI for setting up your domain, as well as a ton of cool free features like email forwarding. If I had a web host that I had more control over, I would use something like Lets Encrypt for setting up free SSL certs, but I don’t, and Cloudflare’s proxy approach to SSL is perfect for my domains’ needs. I then found out Cloudflare has no-extra-fee domain registrar pricing. To register a domain on the internet, there is a fee required for ICANN, but most domain providers charge an extra fee on top of that. So I’ve now moved all derpy side project domains to be handled by Cloudflare registrar.
Front end SPA hosting
My web apps these days are typically React and SPA. So I need simple hosting that can help with this. For free.
— GitHub Pages for Front-end SPA hosting
A solid option, especially since I always use GitHub as my repo hosting, however, it does not allow for path routing.
— Netlify
A good option with a free tier for front-end hosting I came across, and it allows for routing!
Backend hosting (NodeJS)
Typically my APIs are NodeJS if I need one, and Apollo GraphQL.
(if no custom logic is needed, Hasura is my favorite tool GraphQL APIs for both the side project and enterprise scale!)
Heroku was a great NodeJS option, but they recently broke my heart and announced that they no longer allowing the free tier.
Glitch.com is a fun site and option for quick hosting (I have been a beta user since they were called hyperdev!). But its focus is more for live edits, collaborative editing, not so much for a legit (hobby) API that can deploy based off a new merge from GitHub for example.
I posted on my company’s engineering channel and got a ton of good options and suggestions for free NodeJS hosting!
- Netlify Functions (uses serverless functions though, so some updates likely needed to the typical Apollo GraphQL API, this should be possible though!)
- Vercel Functions (same serverless type of setup as Netlify it seems)
- Cloudflare now even has a serverless functions hosting, with fewer restrictions on the free tier
- Deno has a free tier and seems to be maybe most similar to Heroku style hosting, without forcing the serverless style of it.
- M3O is a combination of things, such as a central provider of many types of simple but useful APIs (similar to RapidAPI except M3O maintains and hosts the APIs), but also can do serverless lambda apps.
I haven’t picked one of these to try yet but excited to try them out! (Probably going to try Netlify or Cloudflare first since I already use those
Other Free hosting Mentions:
- All the major cloud hosting providers (Google, Azure, AWS) offer a free tier or $ credit that includes options for hosting, both SPA front end and (serverless) backend, however the account setup process is a bit more involved and requires throwing down a credit card.
- Fly.io offers edge deployments with a free tier. However, it requires a CLI install and deployment, rather than being all cloud and connect to GitHub repo deployments, which is more what I was looking for.
Any other suggestions for free hosting out there?
