7 Free Website Hosting Options for Side Projects (and the Catch in Each)

You built the thing. It runs on your laptop. Now it needs an address on the internet, and you would like that to cost nothing until real people show up. Good news: in 2026 you can host a real site for $0. The catch is that every free host has a tripwire, and the tripwires are all different. Here are the seven I would look at, and the trap hiding in each one.

Ask this first: does your app need a server?

A static site is just files: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images. A landing page, a docs site, a portfolio, a React or Astro build that calls an API from the browser. Free static hosting is easy to find and the limits are generous.

An app with a server runs code on every request. Think a Node API, a Python backend or a Next.js app with server rendering. Free servers exist, but they come with naps, caps or a clock, so know which one you are building before you compare anything.

Then ask one more thing, because it catches people late: will this project make money? Some free plans ban commercial use outright. Check that before you send your first visitor.

Free static hosting that holds up

Cloudflare Pages

This is my default for anything static. The free plan gives you 100 projects per account, 500 builds a month and up to 20,000 files per site, with each file capped at 25 MiB. The limits page lists no bandwidth cap at all. The catch is build capacity. Free builds run one at a time, so ten quick commits in a row will queue up behind each other. Details are on the Cloudflare Pages page.

GitHub Pages

If your code already lives on GitHub, this is the shortest path to a live URL. Sites can be up to 1 GB, with a soft limit of 100 GB of bandwidth a month. The trap is the terms. GitHub does not allow Pages for online businesses, ecommerce or commercial SaaS sites. A portfolio or open source docs are fine. The marketing site for your paid product is a gray area you do not want to test. See GitHub Pages.

Netlify

Netlify runs on credits now. The Free plan includes 300 a month. A production deploy costs 15 credits, bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB and every 10,000 web requests cost 2. Do the math and you will see that 20 production deploys alone use the whole 300. When credits hit zero, every web project on the team is paused and visitors see a "Site not available" page. Netlify emails you at 50, 75 and 100 percent of the allotment, so take those emails seriously. More on the Netlify page.

Free hosting for apps with a server

Vercel

The Hobby plan costs $0 and includes 1 million function invocations and 100 GB of fast data transfer a month, for one developer seat. It is also for personal, noncommercial use only, and Hobby accounts are capped, so you cannot buy extra usage when you hit the ceiling. Perfect for a side project with no revenue. The day you add a pricing page, read the terms again. Here is the Vercel listing.

Render

Static sites are always free on Render. Free web services get 750 instance hours per workspace each month, but they spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and need about a minute to wake up on the next request. That is fine for a hobby API and awkward for a demo you are showing to an investor. Two more traps: the free Postgres database expires 30 days after you create it, with a 14 day grace period before deletion and no backups, and free web services cannot send email over ports 25, 465 or 587. Read the Render entry before you build on it.

Deno Deploy

The free plan covers 1 million requests, 20 GiB of egress and 10 hours of active CPU a month. You get 10 apps, 5 custom domains and 3 team members. It suits JavaScript and TypeScript projects well. Outside reviews are thin, though, so you will be one of the early people finding the rough edges. See Deno Deploy.

Northflank

This one is the quiet winner for anything that must stay awake. The free Sandbox includes 2 services, 1 database and 2 cron jobs, with always on compute and no sleeping. It is built for developers, so expect Dockerfiles, buildpacks and a steeper learning curve than the click and deploy hosts above. Details live on the Northflank page.

Free in name only

Two popular hosts do not belong on a free list, even though people keep recommending them that way. Fly.io has no free plan for new organizations, only a trial of up to 2 hours of Machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first. Railway gives new accounts a one time $5 trial grant, then $1 of credit a month. When the credit runs out, the workloads stop. Both are fair products. Neither is free hosting.

Pick in 30 seconds

• Landing page, docs or portfolio: Cloudflare Pages.
• Open source project already on GitHub: GitHub Pages.
• Personal Next.js project with no income: Vercel Hobby.
• Backend that has to stay awake: Northflank.
• Hobby API where a one minute wake up is fine: Render.
• Anything that earns money: check the commercial use terms first, then budget for a paid plan.

Limits change, and several of these changed this year. Before you commit, open the pricing page and look for three things: whether commercial use is allowed, what happens when you hit a limit, and whether a card is required. Every host above has those three answers on its page in this directory, along with a last verified date.