Where To Host Your Developer Projects For Free

Site 1: Netlify

Netlify's easy to use. Just stick your project on GitHub, bitbucket, ect, connect it to your Netlify account, and Netlify will rebuild your site/project any time there's a change to the GitHubrepo.

What I like:

They have a great free tier. The only thing I've ever had to pay for is pro forms. If you're using their form processing there's a limit of 100 submissions per month. But that leads to point to...

They make it super easy to process forms. All you have to do is stick a few extra attributes on your form and Netlify will be able to receive and store form submission for you without you having to handle any backend logic.

Lambda functions (Serverless functions): Netlify allows you to have functions hanging around in the back that you can call to do things you'd usually need to set up a server for (like sending payment processing requests to Stripe's API, or talk to a database)

What I don't like:

There's a reason this is the first hosting platform I recommend.

Site 2: Heroku

Heroku's pretty similar to Netlify. Connect your repo and build!

What I like:

Plugins. There are some great plugins you can use. One I'm currently using is basically a chron jobs plugin that calls functions on a node server to reset my todo list items.

It's free.

What I don't like:

When your project hasn't been accessed in a while it gets spun down to save space on their servers. This means whenever you go to your project again it takes a few minutes to rebuild and show up.

Site 3: CodeSandbox

What I like:

You can build your entire project in codesandbox. Just make an account, select what you want to work in (react, vue, Node HTTP Server, Gatsby, Next.js Cx.js ect). No other IDE/Text editor needed.

You can also connect to github and pull projects in from there.

What I don't like:

Just like Heroku your projects don't stay up. But it's free so hey, can't complain.