Free Hosting Methods
In this article, I am going to introduce three way to free hosting your simple website.
Google Firebase
Firebase Hosting is a static and dynamic web hosting service that launched on May 13, 2014. It supports hosting static files such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other files, as well as dynamic Node.js support through Cloud Functions. The service delivers files over a content delivery network (CDN) through HTTP Secure (HTTPS) and Secure Sockets Layer encryption (SSL). Firebase partners with Fastly, a CDN, to provide the CDN backing Firebase Hosting. The company states that Firebase Hosting grew out of customer requests; developers were using Firebase for its real-time database but needed a place to host their content.1
Firebase provide 1G space and 10G per month transfer for free, which is pretty enough for normal website.
Setup
- register a google account
- create a firebase project in firebase console
- install nodejs
- setup
# install firebase
npm install -g firebase-tools
# login in google
firebase login
# go to website root
cd path-to-your-website-root
# init firebase
firebase init
# before deploy remember to configure firebase.json
firebase deploy
Firebase supports connecting to a custom domain after verifying ownership of domain. eg www.mpcf.com.au
Github pages
Github pages is another static hosting service provided by github. Moreover, it integrated with Jekyll for static and blog generation.
Github pages provide 1G space and 100G transfer per month for free.
set up
-
create a repository in github
- your-github-name.github.io
- any repository with gh-pages branch or master pages
- enable pages in settings
- connect to custom domain if necessary
- push your static website or jekyll files to the repository
Your house or office
You can host any website at home or in your office as long as there is internet connect.
Set up
- You need to register a DDNS service so that your dynamic IP address can be blind to a fixed secondary domain.
According to Wiki2, Dynamic DNS (DDNS or DynDNS) is a method of automatically updating a name server in the Domain Name System (DNS), often in real time, with the active DDNS configuration of its configured hostnames, addresses or other information.
* highly recommended https://www.dynu.com
- set up ddns on your router or computer
- set up router If your router have ddns service
- run ddns updating software on computer
-
setup port forward and fixed ip to your target computer
- setup http servers on target computer