You want to host a project without paying. A portfolio site, a side project, a Discord bot, a small API. Here are the free options that work in 2026, what each handles best, and where they fall short.
Static Sites and Frontend Apps
Vercel (Free Tier)
- Best for: Next.js, React, Svelte, static sites
- Bandwidth: 100 GB/month
- Custom domain: Yes, free SSL
- Deploy: Push to Git, auto-deploys on every commit
Netlify (Free Tier)
- Best for: Static sites, JAMstack
- Bandwidth: 100 GB/month
- Builds: 300 build minutes/month
- Forms: 100 submissions/month built-in
Cloudflare Pages (Free Tier)
- Best for: Static sites + serverless Workers
- Bandwidth: Unlimited
- Builds: 500/month
- Workers: 100,000 requests/day free
- D1 database: 5 GB free (SQLite at edge)
Cloudflare Pages stands out with unlimited bandwidth and D1 for free database storage.
GitHub Pages
- Best for: Documentation, portfolios, simple HTML
- No dynamic features, public repo required for free
Backend and APIs
Render (Free Tier)
- Web services: 750 hours/month free
- Sleep: Free services sleep after 15 minutes without inbound traffic (about a minute to spin up)
- PostgreSQL: Free, expires 30 days after creation, with a 14 day grace period to upgrade
The 30 day database expiration makes Render unsuitable for long-term projects without paying.
Fly.io (No Free Tier for New Accounts)
- Trial: 2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first
- Global edge deployment
- Requires a credit card on file to keep apps running after the trial
Railway ($1 Monthly Credit)
- One time $5 trial credit for 30 days, no credit card needed
- Then $1 of free credit per month, up to 0.5 GB RAM per service
- PostgreSQL included
- Good for prototyping; credit runs out fast
Discord Bots and Always-On Services
Oracle Cloud Always Free
- CPU: 2 Arm OCPUs (Ampere A1)
- RAM: 12 GB
- Storage: 200 GB
- Sleep: Never, but Oracle can reclaim instances it sees as idle over a 7 day period
The strongest free option for always-on services. Works for Discord bots, background workers, and Minecraft servers on Java/ARM. If you prefer a simpler path for a Discord bot, Space-Node's bot plans skip the VPS setup entirely: Growth is €0.50 a month for 512 MB RAM, billed €3.00 every 6 months plus a €0.50 setup fee on that term. The free 64 MB Starter plan cannot be ordered right now.
Free Databases
| Service | Type | Free Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | PostgreSQL | 500 MB, 2 projects |
| Turso | SQLite | 9 GB, 500M rows read |
| Cloudflare D1 | SQLite | 5 GB |
| MongoDB Atlas | MongoDB | 512 MB shared |
When to Get a VPS
Free hosting breaks down when:
- You get real traffic and hit bandwidth limits
- You need background processing (most free tiers sleep)
- You run multiple services
- You need reliability (free tiers have no SLA)
A VPS gives you one server for everything: site, API, bot, database. No juggling five different dashboards.
Not every project needs a VPS, though. A portfolio, a WordPress blog or a small PHP site with a database runs fine on shared web hosting, where the host looks after the server itself. Space-Node web hosting uses DirectAdmin and starts at €2.49 a month. Ordering opens around the end of October, and our VPS plans are out of stock until about the same time.