10 Free Frontend Hosting Websites – How to host your Frontend apps for free?

When working on a front-end project, it’s quite common that you will have to host your website on a platform so that it can be viewed by anyone on the internet. If you’ve just started your career as a front-end engineer, you must be exploring ways to save time and cost. You must be thinking of multiple options to host your front-end apps for free! I have tested almost every popular hosting site out there and found some of the best websites that let you host your front-end apps for free! In this article, I’m going to introduce you to 10 such front-end hosting websites that will enable you to build, test, and deploy your front-end app without spending a dime! Check out these 10 Frontend Hosting websites to find your answer.

What is a front-end app?

The layer or component of an application that the user can use, view, and interact with through buttons, graphics, menus, and text is known as the front-end application, also referred to as the application’s interface. Front-end apps mainly compose of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In today’s day and age, you can achieve a lot with just a front-end application. You can utilize different APIs in your front-end apps, or use a backend-as-a-service platform like Firebase. There’s also a plethora of libraries and frameworks for developing front-end apps like React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte just to name a few.

Why Should You Host Your front-end apps for Free?

One of the main benefits of hosting your front-end apps for free is that you may get started and experiment with different ideas without having to invest any money. If you’re new to front-end development or you’re trying to host your website for the first time, it can be simple to make mistakes and encounter obstacles. It’s frequently best to just try something different rather than trying to repair those issues yourself or hire someone to do it for you. If you wish to try out another service at any moment, you can do so with ease. Free hosting is another excellent approach to becoming familiar with the process of deploying and managing code on the internet.

10 Free Frontend Hosting Websites

There is an abundance of services available that lets you host your front-end apps. These are 10 of the best front-end hosting websites that you can use for free. I have tested every site for its performance and uptime, and have also used most of these to deploy my personal and client websites.

Vercel hosting

Vercel is my absolute favorite when it comes to hosting my personal projects for its simplicity, speed, and reliability. It comes with excellent features such as automatic deploying from git repos, preview URLs, global CDN, serverless function support, collaborative features, and much more.

It also has a very generous free tier with 100 GB of bandwidth, inbuilt SSL, custom domain support, and many more features. Visit their pricing page for more details.

Netlify hosting

Netlify is another excellent all-in-one front-end deployment and management platform with a lot of similar features to Vercel. In addition, Netlify also has its own Forms and Authentication services if you’re interested.

The free plan is also very similar to Vercel with 100 GB of bandwidth, SSL support, custom domains, etc.

Firebase Hosting

Firebase is a backend-as-a-service platform from Google with tons of features for front-end and mobile apps like their Firestore database, authentication, serverless functions, and many more. You can also host your front-end apps on Firebase.

Their free Spark plan comes with 10 GB of storage, 360 MB/day of data transfer, custom domain and SSL support, etc.

GitHub Pages

If you’re already using GitHub to host your code, GitHub Pages can be a great option for you. GitHub Pages is GitHub’s own hosting solution for static front-end sites. Simply go to your repo’s settings and select which branch you’re like to deploy.

If you’re just using HTML, CSS, and JS you can simply choose the main branch as your GitHub Pages site. But if you’re using a framework like React, you’d ideally want to create another branch where you upload your built website as GitHub pages cannot automatically build the projects for you. GitHub Pages has no paid plans and is completely free to use. Visit their website for more details.

Render hosting

For hosting anything from static websites to backend services, databases, etc. Render is a cohesive cloud platform. All of its hosting plans have generous limitations as well as features like free TLS certificates, a worldwide CDN, DDoS protection, auto deployments from Git, etc. The following configurations are included in the Services hosting’s free tier:

• 100 GB/month bandwidth
• Unlimited collaborators
• CDN support
• Automatic continuous deploys from Git
• Custom domains with fully managed TLS

AWS S3 hosting

AWS or Amazon Web Services is one of the world’s leading cloud service platforms. It offers practically all cloud services, and AWS alone offers some of them. One of the AWS services is S3. S3 is primarily used to store static assets like images. But it can also host static websites.

Like GitHub pages, if you’re using a frontend framework, you’d first want to build your app and upload the build files to the S3 bucket. Once it’s uploaded, the bucket URL can be used to visit the application. Additionally, CloudFront may be set up to add a custom domain and HTTPS. On a new account, AWS offers 12 months of free credits which can be used for S3 and other AWS services.

AWS Amplify

To host your front-end apps, Amazon Web Services also offers another solution called Amplify. It’s a perfect solution if you’re using a front-end framework or library as your app will be built and hosted by Amplify using a worldwide CDN. It is very similar to Vercel and Netlify in this aspect.

Git services can be connected with Amplify to enable continuous deployment. Additionally, it offers monitoring, password protection, a custom domain, HTTPS, pull-request previews, and more.

Amplify offers a free trial period of 12 months. The Deployed Apps are quicker and cached in adjacent edge sites to serve very quickly because it leverages the Amazon CloudFront CDN.

Surge.sh

Another quick method for deploying front-end projects is Surge. Surge comes with an excellent CLI for deploying your apps. It is considerably simpler to deploy and configure than other CLIs, and when using it for the first time, you may establish a Surge account right from the console.

If you’re using a front-end framework, make sure to build your app before using the CLI to deploy your builds.

There is one important thing to note if you’re using React though. If you wish to support the HTML5 pushState API, which is used by React libraries for routing, you might want to rename index.html to 200.html in your build folder before launching.

GitLab Pages

GitLab is another version control service and git hosting service much like GitHub. GitLab also has its own Pages service that can be used to deploy static websites, GitLab Pages also supports any static site generators like Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Middleman, Hexo, etc.

GitLab Pages is also a free service and has no paid plans. According to its website, it comes with features such as,

• Free personal or commercial use.
• Use plain HTML or any Static Site Generator (SSG).
• Being able to create websites for your user account, groups, and projects.
• Host your website for free on GitLab.com or on your personal instance.
• Being able to connect your custom domains.
• Add any license information to your content.

GitLab Pages also has great documentation explaining how it works and how you can go about deploying your sites, check it out on their official website.

Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud is a complete cloud platform and is a direct competitor to Amazon’s AWS. It has a plethora of features like creating/managing servers, databases, storage, AI/ML, networking, etc much like AWS. The Google Cloud Storage service is also much like AWS S3 and it is used to store static assets. But it can also be used to host your static websites.

All you need to do to host your website on Google Cloud Storage is build your app, create a bucket, upload the build files in the bucket, make it public, and you are done. HTTPS and a custom domain are not available with Cloud Storage Bucket but you can configure it utilizing the HTTPS Load Balancing service.

There are monthly restrictions on the Free Tier plan of Cloud Storage Bucket. Also for new accounts, Google additionally offers 300$ in free credits.

Conclusion

And that is a wrap. In this article, we looked at what are front-end apps, why you would want to opt for free hosting, and 10 of the best hosting websites for deploying your front-end apps.

Hosting is a very important part of the development process. If you are building a website or an application, front-end hosting is the place where your source code is hosted on a server. These front-end hosting websites enable you to host your front-end apps for free. Apart from the mainstream ones on top of the list, you can also check out the niche hosting websites for front-end hosting. You never know which of these becomes your go-to hosting solution. If you are looking to host your front-end apps for free, you can go through this list of free front-end hosting websites. These websites give you the freedom to host your apps without having to spend a dime!

If you have any questions regarding this article or want to talk about anything technology, you can find me on Twitter. Thank you for reading!