Most cost effective platform to host own projects and assets?

Career Advice
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I feel members of this forum would know a lot about this :laughing:

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it depends on what you want, there are various platforms that are free or have a free tier. Example, github pages for frontend (free), heroku for fullstack (has a free tier)

If you say what resources you need you may get more suggestions

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Honest I havenā€™t yet got to that stage, but basically looking for a platform where I can build projects of which some show off front end skills and some show off backend skills. I may also create and host my own vector graphics and data files.

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or do you want something like replit.com? itā€™s an other kind of thing where you can show your projects

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So the most ā€œcost effectiveā€ if your staring out is free, and there are a few solutions out there that can work for you just to show stuff off for free. However, most come with cavets that prevent them from being the best solution for some cases.

The next question you want to ask yourself is if you need server-side code or not. If you donā€™t, and you just want to have a place to host client-side stuff there are a lot of free tier options. If you do need a back-end, thereā€™s only a few options, with cavets, like the server goes to sleep after a short period of inactivity so the service can reclaim the resources, which means the app will take more time to ā€œwake upā€ to serve a request.

client-side free tier options:

  1. github-pages
  2. Firebase hosting
  3. Netlify
  4. Digital Ocean app platform static site hosting

This isnā€™t exhaustive, as hosting client-side files is more or less static file hosting, which is very cheap for services to provide. The same canā€™t be said for services that provide server-side support, which costs server resources for each ā€œinstanceā€ they are providing. Hence why there are limited options.

Server-side options:

  1. Heroku
  2. Repl.it (includes editor environment)

There are other options I didnā€™t mention, like codepen for client-side, as these are more ā€œtoolsā€ you can use to not only "hostā€™ your app, but build it aswell. However I consider these more sandbox/playgrounds rather than options for where you directly host your final products.

Its also worth keeping in mind that you can build a lot of cool stuff without using anything more than the front-end, or for some options, like firebase hosting, or netlify, you can leverage the rest of the platform to get some server-side support thru cloud functions. These services allow you to run individual endpoints in a secured environment, so you can do stuff like make calls to an API without exposing your secret keys and usually provide a free tier. However, cloud functions usually force you to write your code to work with the platform, rather than give you the freedom to do what you want how you want.

Lots of options out there, and I didnā€™t get anywhere near all the possible options. Its also worth mentioning that even if you start looking into paying just a few $ a month, you can get much more support and have vastly more options.

Good luck, keep building, keep learning :+1:

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For code hosting - GitHub and GitLab.com have good free plans.

For hosting projects for local development - a Raspberry Pi 4 and a couple SD cards.

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Thanks a lot for the detailed reply :two_hearts:

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