Hosting Options for Portfolio Page

Hi everyone!

I’m working on finishing my portfolio site (finally!) and am excited to begin applying for jobs! But I need some advice on which hosting service is best for someone like me who is still new to the game and wants to deploy the best-performing portfolio possible.

Well-known developers like Brad Traversy advise against hosting your portfolio on a free platform or a free-option of a platform because the performance won’t be as good and it wouldn’t look professional if your portfolio site said something like “firstname-lastname.herokuapp.com”.

How true is that? And what paid hosting services are most optimal for an aspiring web developer trying to land their first interview?

Thanks-in-advance!!!

There are some hosting company that are very cheap. You will have more services and it will be more professional for companies you apply for.

Buy a cheap domain name from Google Domains and attach it to a Firebase app. They host static sites for free, including SSL/TLS, and attaching a domain you bought from Google is extremely easy. Plus, Google will hide your whois information so you don’t get spammed as much from people browsing domain name information.

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Many people use GitHub Pages for static sites, which is perfectly acceptable for people looking for their first web job. You can even use a custom URL by buying one for a year from somewhere like GoDaddy for a few dollars (depending on which domain you want).

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Use heroku and don’t be afraid, I used it and it works fine .
Here what you should do to get the best of the free plan:
1- New accounts receive 550 free dyno hours and you can verify your identity with a credit card for an additional 450 hours (Renewed every month). So 1000 free dyno hours in total (more then 41 days) which is enough to make your website stay hosted all the time

2- Free plan SLEEPS AFTER 30 MINS OF INACTIVITY, so if no requests to your website during 30 minutes , your website will go to sleep BUT don’t worry because this does NOT mean your website will be unavailable (JUST if some wants to access your website will wait more time up to 10 SECONDS til your website wake up)

3- About sleeping, there’s a trick to prevent it from sleeping by creating a FUNCTION in your server-side code which will send http request every 25 minutes and HAHA you’ve a website 24/7 UP

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Wouldn’t the free-tier on Amazon Web Services be good? Get some experience with a sought after skill and host a web page… a win-win.

I use Netlify and point my domain name to it. It’s free. You can link your github to it and it auto updates your site every time you push to github. I’ve never had an issue with loading times although I’ve never run a speed test on it.

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Own all domains for your real name and your nickname.

Then redirect all these domains to your homepage.
I use Netlify, but all other services, like Zeit Now, Github Pages etc. will work.

Does it make a difference which domain I go with? I.e., am I more likely to impress prospective employers/ clients with a “.dev” domain vs. a “.com” domain?

Heroku, Netlify, ZIET.

He might be talking about other free ftp hosting sites and yeh those suck but those sites i mentioned are good enough. its not like youre gonna get so much traffic on your page that the server wont be able to handle it. I host apps on those sites and they work just fine. i even have some react apps on it.

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You’re over-thinking this now :smile:

I can’t imagine any future employer is going to make a decision based on the domain you use for your portfolio website. There was (supposedly) a little prejudice a while back over hotmail and aol email addresses, but I can’t recall coming across anything re. website domains.

I suppose you might face a little prejudice if you use a country code which a particular employer has a problem with… but then you’d probably not want to work for someone like that anway.

If you were going for a more of a designer role rather than a developer one, your choice of domain name can be an additional way of showing off your creativity. There are sites out there like Domainr, where you can search for a name and it comes up with all sorts of different permutations, e.g. dus.ch or du.sc/h.

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I’m hosting in infinity free, and so far it works just fine. It’s very easy to set up.

https://infinityfree.net/ => web
http://mrnobody.epizy.com/ => an example

I wouldn’t mind to hear about downsides!