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Yearning to have a website you can call your own? Stop dreaming, as there are services that can make your dream come true. I'm not talking about fly by night free web hosting that doesn't last long and just disappears unannounced along with your precious website. I guarantee you, this is the real deal!
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After registering the domain, you'll also need a web hosting service. I put up my first website on Google's Blogger. Here are the reasons why it is ideal for newbies:
- It's a free blogging platform. It is comforting to know that your site is hosted on their servers. Downtime is rare and the servers can withstand Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Plus, it is organically optimized for Google Search.
- It is very easy to use; you can launch your website in a matter of seconds.
- You can use a TLD at no extra cost.
- It has an adequate collection of widgets like an email subscription, contact form, RSS, etc. to fully equip your website. Integrating ads is a breeze.
- Blogger is also widely supported with tons of high-quality but free-to-use templates.
To start, register at Blogger. Inside the dashboard, click on the "New Blog" button, provide the title, the unique address, and select a template. Finally, click on the "Create blog" button. Just like that, you have established your online presence.
If you wish to change the template, head on to TemplateLib, CopyBloggerThemes, TemplateToaster, BTemplates, and GooyaabiTemplates. The sites have plenty of free professional designs sure to meet your needs. I personally like the Arbutus, and Singl. Every template has a demo link, a description, and instructions on how to customize it. To use the one you liked, download it, then click on Blogger's "Template" link in the left sidebar menu and then the "Backup/Restore" button in the top right corner. Upload it and instantly your website has a brand new look. Isn't it lovely?
If you're a neophyte, you may find it difficult to customize templates. Depending on the level of modification, you'll need programming skills to navigate your way around HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Blogger's own script. But no worries, as there are lots of Blogger tutorial, tips, and tricks. Here's a nifty tool for generating conditional tags from Codegena.
If you need to add an affiliate disclosure or any content at the end of every post, here's a piece of code that will insert it without editing each one.
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<style type='text/css'>
.entry-content:after {
content: 'replace_this_with_your_text.';
}
</style>
</b:if>
Just copy the code and edit your template. Paste it just before the </head> and change 'replace_this_with_your_text' with your own. Aside from text, you can use it to insert images.
To insert an image, change 'replace_this_with_your_text.' with url(replace_this_with_your_image_url). Of course, you need to change the replace_this_with_your_image_url with your image URL.
To disable Blogger's own cookie consent notice, add this code before the </head>:
<script type='text/javascript'>
cookieChoices = {};
</script>
Blogger also supports custom domains at no cost. Here's how. On the downside, Blogger doesn't support file hosting. The solution is to use third-party services for favicons, images, JavaScripts, CSS, and other files.
OpenDrive is a cloud storage provider offering 5 GB of space in its free Personal plan. The feature that is important is the "Public" folder, which by default allows hotlinking. This will enable you to integrate external files into Blogger. From WordPress you can export posts and pages to Blogger.
Substack is a subscription based blogging platform with built-in newsletter feature. Its free, but once you shift to a paid subscription, they automatically take 10% of the revenue. Another option is Bear Blog.
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For all the good things Blogger is, inevitably as years passed, I've outgrown it and decided to go on paid shared hosting. However, based on experience, avoid shared hosting like the plague. The industry is good as dead. It's best to go straight to cloud hosting.
But if you are into free shared webhosting you may check out India-based GoogieHost, and InfinityFree.
You can also create websites using Google Sites. The features are limited, but if it's a simple website with pages, it will be enough.
Check out Carrd, Site123, and About.ME for cheap personal landing page. Tiny.bio offers affiliate links and custom domain use in free account.
WonderCMS is a free and simple flat file CMS. AutoMad, HTMLy, Grav, and TypeMill have more features. Pico CMS is stupidly simple and blazing fast. Here's a list of flat file CMS.
Neos CMS is free open-source, self-hosted and enterprise-grade. Craft CMS is also self-hosted and the Solo account is free.
EmDash is a serverless CMS built by CloudFlare using TypeScript, and Astro framework. Most of its features took inspriation from WordPress, but modernized. It is designed to run efficiently on CloudFlare D1 and R2 Workers but it can deploy on any standard Node JS server. Use the EmDash Exporter plugin to export WordPress content. Test the demo.
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An alternative to Blogger is to just host a static page. Netlify's Drop and GitHub Pages allow you to host static pages with a custom domain and SSL for free. Another option is to use CloudFlare Pages. It is connected to a GitHub repository. They offer a free plan, but unlike other services, it has unlimited sites, requests, and bandwidth. But you can only do 1 build at a time, with a maximum of 500 builds in a month. ideal for use for static web pages, especially one-page landing pages. Here's how to redirect your app's pages.dev URL to the custom domain. Prevent the app's pages.dev URL from showing in search results.
Sevalla, Wasmer.IO, and Vercel offer free accounts for hosting static websites. Google Firebase offers 10 GB storage and 10 GB data transfer per month for free in their Spark plan. Surge.sh is command line driven and requires Node.js, the custom domain is free.
Pelican, Jekyll, Hugo, and Gatsby are Static Site Generators(SSG) that help manage site content, but they require technical knowledge. Here's a list of static site generators.
There are also online website builders like GrapeJS, and RankVise that allow html export. WebStudio has a free web builder. Silex is a free and open-source website builder. Astro is an all-in-one web framework for building content-driven websites like blogs, marketing, and e-commerce. It includes everything you need to create a website, built-in with hundreds of different integrations and API hooks available to customize a project to the exact use case and needs. Astro can be paired with Prismic, and StoryBlok which are headless, component-based CMS that separates content management from presentation, allowing for flexibility across different digital channels like websites and apps. Sanity.IO is an another option. Strapi.IO is free if self-hosted. Cockpit is a sovereign headless content platform, it is free, self-hosted, and open-source.
GrapeJS Desktop, Vvveb, and PaperBits can be installed on the PC. Here's tutorial on how to build your own website builder using GrapeJS.
CMS.JS is a fully client-side, JavaScript markdown site generator that uses plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript to generate a website.
To make things easy on yourself, use online GUI's like Decap CMS. Desktop equivalents are Publii, Mobirise, Hocus CMS and RocketCake. Here's a tutorial to build a website with Publii and Netlify. There are free Mobirise extensions in witsec.nl, including one that removes the footer attribution. BuhoCMS and FrontMatter both require an installed SSG. FrontMatter is an extension of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor. CMS Pages runs on top of GitHub, it doesn't require a SSG.
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Aside from shared hosting, VPS is another form of web hosting. In shared hosting, clients share the resources of the same computer. This set-up means clients are not guaranteed the computing resources since they fluctuate from time to time depending on how many are using the resources at a particular time.
The concept of virtualization is similar to shared hosting, where one computer can have multiple sites running on it. However, the technology allows each account to be treated as its own machine with its own dedicated resources and operating system. This provides the client with a much more stable hosting environment with little to no fluctuation in the resources available. Contabo is a cheap but high quality VPS provider based in Germany.
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Cloud hosting, in a way, is similar to VPS, except that the former draws computing resources from several machines instead of just one. As such, they have less downtime, are scalable, and are high availability. With the advent of advances in software and hardware, cloud hosting is now more affordable and I expect the price to continue going down.
Oracle Cloud offers one of the most generous "Always Free" tiers in the industry. Here are some core services that's included:
Compute(Virtual Machines):
- Arm-based Ampere A1: Up to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM. Extremely powerful, can use for hosting WordPress and self-hosted apps. Can be split into 1 large VM or up to 4 smaller ones. Ampere is an ARM 64-based architecture, this type of CPU uses less electricity, so they can afford to offer it free.
- AMD-based(x86): 2 VMs using the "VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro" shape(1/8 OCPU and 1 GB RAM each). Can use for hosting static sites.
Developer and Databases:
- Autonomous Database: Provision for up to 2 database instances. Each database includes 1 OCPU and 20 GB of storage. Choose from: Autonomous Transaction Processing(ATP), optimized for web apps and transactions. Autonomous Data Warehouse(ADW), optimized for analytics. Autonomous JSON Database, for NoSQL-style document development APEX Application Development, a low-code platform with database.
- NoSQL Database: Up to 133 million reads/writes per month and 3 tables with 25 GB per table.
- HeatWave: Automated and integrated generative AI and machine learning in one cloud service for transactions and lakehouse-scale analytics. One standalone HeatWave instance in OCI in your home region, along with up to 50 GB of storage and up to 50 GB of backup storage.
Storage:
- Block Volume: 200 GB(used for your VM boot volumes and extra data disks).
- Object Storage: 20 GB(shared between Standard, Infrequent Access and Archive). Unstructured storage. Up to 50,000 Object Storage API requests per month.
Networking:
- Outbound Data Transfer: 10 TB per month(one of the highest limits available).
- Load Balancers: 1 Flexible Load Balancer(10 Mbps) or 1 Network Load Balancer.
- Virtual Cloud Network(VCN): Up to 2 VCNs with support for site-to-site VPN.
Observability and Security:
- Email Delivery: 100 emails per day, 3,000 emails total per month. Exceeding the limit will cost $9 per 100,000 emails.
- Certificates: The Certificates service provides certificate issuance, storage, and management capabilities, including revocation and automatic renewal. Up to 5 Private CA and 150 private TLS certificates.
Use the cost estimator if there's a need to upgrade to paid.
Take note, the Archive Object Storage is the most cost-effective for long-term backups, but retrieval takes 1–4 hours and requires a "restored" state. Standard or the Infrequent Access Object Storage is best for frequent backups requiring immediate retrieval. Infrequent Access provides lower storage costs than Standard, but charges for data retrieval. It is suitable for data accessed rarely but needed immediately when required.
When installing the software stack, make sure ARM 64 support is included. While working with the Oracle Cloud instance, I've learned quite a few tricks. The easiest way to login via SSH is by using these commands in Windows cmd:
cd "path_of_private_key_file"
ssh -i "private_key_file_name" username@ip
Private and public keys can be downloaded when setting up the instance. A username and public IP can be had after the instance is provisioned.
If root access is needed to run scripts, execute this command:
sudo su - root
If an "unprotected private key file" error is encountered, run this command:
chmod 400 "path_of_private_key_file/private_key_file_name"
In case Oracle stopped your instance for some reason or another, fret not, as your data is still available. Here's a YouTube tutorial from IdeaSpot on how to fix a stopped Oracle Cloud instance. Here's how to fix the "Clocks Out of Sync" error and the list of free internet time servers to synch to. This is a hack from Reddit to resolve the Oracle Cloud "Out of Capacity" issue in the free tier.
Here are some tutorials on how to host WordPress in IBM Cloud's free tier. On Google Cloud's free tier, follow this.
Unlike other cloud hosting providers with set plans, Kamatera Express Compute allows custom setup and upgrade of resources like RAM, CPU, storage, and bandwidth and therefore is cheaper.
One disadvantage of VPS and most cloud hosting is the steep technical knowledge needed to set up and manage your account. To help manage the server, you need a control panel like cPanel. A Web Host Manager (WHM) is used to manage several cPanels. If an agency resells web hosting to clients using WHMCS billing management, which charges $18.95/month for serving up to 250 clients. However, these are expensive. Plesk is an affordable alternative that combines cPanel and WHM features. The Web Host Edition provides unlimited domains with subscription, account, and reseller management for just $18.33 per month. It also comes with the powerful WordPress Toolkit. Cloud Panel and Cipi are free control panels specifically built for the cloud. Here's a Cloud Panel guide to setup and install WP. It is best installed on Debian OS. Cloud Panel is a per-server installation, while Cipi aggregates multiple servers. HestiaCP is also an option, it is a fork of VestaCP which is russian made. Webmin is another.
Coolify is a software that makes self-hosting simple and powerful. It lets you run your applications, databases, and services on your own server, maybe use as alternative to control panels. Checkout the all services supported. Here's a video on how to install Coolify in a server. Easy Self Host is a YoutTube channel on self-hosting tutorials.
CapRover is an easy to use app deployment and web server manager. Check the supported apps here. To install follow instructions here.
YunoHost support more apps, but limited to Debian servers only. There are workarounds to install in a Ubuntu server here. Here's the latest supported Debian version.
Check other self-hosted app launchers at EasyIndie.APP.
Here's a very good comparison between OpenLiteSpeed and NGinX.
Closte and CloudWays paid cloud management services, with the cost of the cloud server already included in their prices. Closte is exclusively integrated with Google Cloud (GC) while CloudWays supports DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and GC. Get Plesk Web Admin SE for free at Vultr. The paid version is also cheaper. Unlike other services, Closte is used to manage solely WordPress(WP) sites. Despite these limitations, it does the job extremely well as it is equipped with powerful features like backup, firewall, auto-update, caching, SEO, etc., and it is cost-effective because it is a pay-as-you-go service. SpinUpWP is an alternative. If you prefer commands, EasyEngine and WordOps are tools that help install and manage WP sites by automatically installing needed packages like the latest PHP, MySQL, nGinX, LetsEncrypt free SSL, etc. Moss.sh offers a free account that comes with 1 integration but unlimited servers and sites!
If you're looking for higher cloud resources, there's SiteGround's Cloud hosting, which is truly auto-scaling without any downtime. It is quite expensive because it is managed. ScalaHosting is also offering Managed Cloud VPS, but without the auto-scaling and dedicated IP for each site features. It does have unlimited bandwidth.
XCloud is a more practical choice price-wise, their managed Elite plan with 8 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe SSD, 3 vCPU, and 4 TB Bandwidth cost $50.00/month.
Tips to host web apps for free.
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No-code and low-code development refers to the process of building web or mobile applications without needing to write traditional, line-by-line computer code. Instead of typing complex syntax, users build apps visually using graphical interfaces, drag-and-drop components, and pre-built templates. Some services are AI assisted.
NoCode Tech is a good place to learn how to build apps without coding for free. Check out some no-code tools at ZeroQode.
WebFlow, Zite, Figma Make, and Base44 offer a free plan and affordable plans.
YCode is an all-in-one, visual no-code website and web application builder, it is free if self-hosted. Rintagi and SaltCorn are other FOSS options.
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