How to host a website for free!

How to host a website for free!

A blog post by Firebrand

There’s something wrong with nowadays’ hosting providers. They offer pretty basic plans for a price of Boeing-707 per month. Of course it’d make sense, if I’d have a website with high traffic and a lot of assets, but why would I pay nearly $60 per year to host my 1.1mb retro webpage? The Internet was intended to connect people for the smallest cost possible, now you have to pay quite a lot of money just to have your little webpage hosted. Thankfully web-enthusiasts like Neocities can give you an opportunity to have your own corner on the WWW for free of charge!

Third-level domain + free hosting (1GB/static)

You can register any available third-level domain name like you.neocities.org and host your website there. It’s the easiest and most common way to start building your digital identity.  «It offers 1 GB of storage space for free sites and no server-side scripting for both paid and free subscriptions. The service's expressed goal is to "revive the support of free web hosting of the now-defunct GeoCities". Neocities started in 2013. As of April 2024, it hosted more than 765,600 sites», as said on the Wikipedia.

Link: https://neocities.org/

Free hosting (5GB/semistatic)

If you are planning to buy SLD (Second-Level Domain name) or already got one, you can use this service to host your domain. Unlike Neocities, it supports backend scripts/applets (PHP) but they are quite limited. Biz.nf offers slightly more than Neocities overall and as I said, comes with several annoying limitations.

For your SLD you can have:

• 5GB of disk space
• 2 Mail accounts
• 3 subdomains
• PHP support
• Hash-function encryption (e.g. for passwords)
• Full access to .htaccess file

Now about the cons, the free version contains all of the next annoying stuff:

• No direct PHP Server access
• Executables and most of video/audio files are blocked and cannot be used (.mp3,.mp4,.exe,.zip,.sh,.avi, etc…). However, if you just remove the extension of any forbidden file (bacon.exe —> bacon), the server will accept it. Also, Wave audio files, GIFs and all types of pictures are allowed (.wav,.gif,.png,etc…)
• Hotlinking is turned off and locked (though, there are methods to bypass this)

Link: https://biz.nf/

Hope you liked this blog post! Comment below if you know some other free hosting/domain providers and I will probably add them here later :)