21 Free Hosting Providers for Your Static Website in 2021

Let's assume you made a static website made in Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby, or Hexo for instance. Or maybe you made a JavaScript application in one of the popular frameworks ReactJS, Angular, Vue.js, Svelte... etc. It may be a simple side-project or just an app for learning, but it always comes to the problem where to host it, which provider to use, and which provider offers most features for free so you can show to everybody your work.

Well, it’s 2021 and it has never been easier to host your static website for free. Each one differs in some way but essentially they all offer the same service, so we created a list of 21 free hosting providers that you might consider for your current or next project.

Are you using some of these providers? Let us know in the comments on your experience with them.

1. AWS S3

Amazon AWS is probably one of the most known hosting providers on the internet, even if you don't choose AWS, chances are you'll end up on AWS since many of the providers below are built on top of them. So instead you may consider hosting your website directly on AWS.

AWS is completely free for the first year of use, after that, you get charged for what you use.

Free plan includes:

• 5GB of Amazon S3 storage in the S3 Standard storage class
• 20,000 GET Requests
• 2,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST Requests
• 15GB of Data Transfer Out each month for one year.

2. Netlify

Netlify gained a good reputation in the developers' community for their hassle-free service and a very generous plan with plenty of features. It's an all-in-one platform offering Analytics, Forms, Serverless functions, and much more.

Free plan includes:

• 100GB/month of bandwidth
• 300min/month of build time
• Unlimited websites
• Automated builds from Git
• Deploy to global Edge network
• Site previews for every push
• Instant rollbacks to any version
• Deploy static assets & dynamic serverless functions
• SSL

3. Firebase

Although Firebase has all the features for you to launch a full-stack application, it's also a very convenient hosting provider. Very simple to use with their Firebase CLI tool.

Free plan includes:

• 10GB/month of bandwidth
• 10GB of storage
• Custom domain
• SSL
• Unlimited websites

4. Cloudflare Pages

Cloudflare Pages is a JAMstack platform for frontend developers to collaborate and deploy websites. Cloudflare Pages has a generous free plan and out-of-the-box features like a fastest network, SSL, and support for the latest web standards with HTTP/3, QUIC, image compression out of the box, and more.

Free plan includes:

• 1 build at a time
• 500 builds per month
• Unlimited sites
• Unlimited requests
• Unlimited bandwidth

5. Github Pages

Github Pages is a very popular choice for non-commercial projects. It's free where you get to host one site per GitHub account and organization, and unlimited project sites.

Free plan includes:

• Custom domain
• SSL
• Bulid on deploy

6. Gitlab Pages

Gitlab Pages is free forever with no limits, but the website needs to be in GitLab repository.

Free plan includes:

• Use for any personal or business website.
• Use any Static Site Generator (SSG) or plain HTML.
• Create websites for your projects, groups, or user account.
• Host your site on your own GitLab instance or on GitLab.com for free.
• Connect your custom domains and TLS certificates.
• Attribute any license to your content.

7. Vercel

Vercel, previously known as Zeit, focuses a lot on end-user performances. It's a platform specificaly built for front-end developers.

Free plan includes:

• Custom domain
• SSL
• Continuous Deployment with Git
• Unlimited websites & APIs
• Serverless Functions in Node.js, Go, and more

8. Surge

Surge has been around for quite some time and developers love it for its simplicity to instantly deploy projects using their command-line tool Surge. It provides a plentiful of features for hassle-free front-end development.

Free plan includes:

• Free custom domain support
• Free SSL for surge.sh subdomains
• pushState support for single page apps
• Custom 404.html pages
• Barrier-free deployment through the CLI
• Easy integration into your Grunt toolchain
• Cross-origin resource support

9. Render

Render is a fully-managed cloud platform where you can host static sites, backend APIs, databases, cron jobs, and all your other apps in one place.

Free plan includes:

• Lightning-fast CDN
• Automatic continuous deploys from Git
• Custom domains with fully managed SSL
• Unlimited collaborators
• Unlimited custom domains
• Automatic Brotli compression for faster sites
• Native HTTP/2 support
• Automatic HTTP → HTTPS redirects
• Custom URL redirects and rewrites
• 100 GB/month bandwidth included

10. Stormkit

Stormkit is specialized for JavaScript apps, offering powerful infrastructure for modern apps by simplifing and automating complex processes over the entire life cycle of a JavaScript application.

Free plan includes:

• 1 app
• 1 team seat
• 1m requests (per app)
• 50 GB bandwidth (per app)
• Unlimited domains
• Unlimited deployments
• Unlimited environments
• TLS certificates included

11. Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure Static Web Apps is a relatively new service from Microsoft which still has not defined pricing, but free in preview.

Free plan includes:

• Productivity from local development to GitHub native workflows for CI/CD
• Managed global availability for static content
• Dynamic scale for serverless APIs
• Streamlined management including custom domain configuration and authentication and authorization

12. Hostman

Hostman is full-stack hosting provider that works on top of AWS and DigitalOcean to provide the best reliability possible, making it painless to host and manage your application with plenty of features available. It's also pretty great for static websites on a free plan.

Free plan includes:

• Automatic deploys from Github, Bitbucket or Gitlab
• Blazing-fast CDN
• Free domain and SSL out of the box
• Slack integration
• Unlimited collaborators
• 100GB/month bandwidth

14. Oracle Cloud

Well, Oracle Cloud does not need much introduction, besides offering the massive hosting infrastructure it's also a place you should consider to host projects with low traffic at no cost.

Free plan includes:

• 1GB/month outbound data transfer
• 10k requests/month
• 1GB storage capacity per month

15. Deta

Deta is a relatively new Cloud service for building fast applications offering a generous free plan, but the Deta Drive service is still in development which allows you to upload, host, and serve images and files, so keep an eye on this startup.

Free plan includes:

• Unlimited Databases
• 2 GB Storage
• 25k requests/month

16. Fosshost

Fosshost is available only for free and open source software community. If you have a free open source project, then you should consider this provider.

17. Fly.io

Fly.io is a platform for applications that need to run globally. It runs your code close to users and scales compute in cities where your app is busiest. But you can also run a static website for free! Fly gives you a $10 montly credit to use for your website.

18. Aerobatic

Aerobatic is specifialy built for static websites made in Jekyll, Hugo, Hexo, Gatsby... etc. By offering blazing fast performance on a higly tuned, purpose-built CDN.

Every new website has 30 day trial to test out all Aerobatic features, after that features like custom domain name and SSL starts at $15/month

Free plan includes:

• Unlimited deployments to https://your-site-name.aerobaticapp.com

19. DigitalOcean App Platform

Digital Ocean launched a service called App Platform which provides hosting up to 3 static websites for free. You can build and deploy three static sites for free on the Starter tier, and each additional static site will be charged $3/month.

20. Heroku

Heroku is free for non-commercial apps. It doesn't offer hosting for static websites out-of-the-box but need some hacky tricks, check out this tutorial on how to host your static website.

21. Qovery

Qovery is a platform that combines the power of Kubernetes, the reliability of AWS, and the simplicity of Heroku to augment the developer experience. It accelerates and scales the application development cycle with zero infrastructure management investment. The main futures of Qovery is git deployments, GitHub preview, ephermal environment, databases, custom domains.

Free plan includes:

• Up to 3 applications (An application is a container application, a database or a broker)
• Deployment with Git
• Custom domains + TLS
• Free hosting by Qovery
• Community support

BONUS. Self-hosting on Raspberry Pi

 
 
 

 

 

If none of the providers listed above works for you, then you might consider going self-hosted which definitely has its strong points. Great for small projects and learning, giving you an opportunity to get your hands on the server do some fine-tuning and optimizations. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet, but you might want to start from the Raspberry Pi tutorial.