Genuine free hosting exists, is not a trick, and is a completely reasonable choice for a huge share of student projects. What matters is understanding the shape of what "free" actually includes — which is stable — rather than memorising exact quotas, which change constantly and would be wrong within a year of being written down.
| What | Typically free for |
|---|---|
| Static hosting | Portfolio sites, React apps once built, any project with no server-side logic |
| A subdomain from the host | e.g. yourproject.hostname.app, instead of your own domain |
| Small cloud/serverless usage | Low-traffic Node.js APIs and small backend functions |
| A basic CDN | Most cloud and static hosts include one by default at no extra cost |
| A shared database tier | Small projects on many cloud platforms |
Every free tier follows a recognisable pattern: generous for genuinely small projects, then a hard limit hit once a project gets real traffic or real requirements. The walls themselves are stable across providers, even though the exact numbers attached to each one are not:
Before relying on any free tier for something real, actually read its limits page rather than assuming. The specific numbers matter for your specific project even though they aren't worth memorising in general — a portfolio site with modest traffic almost never comes close to a free tier's bandwidth cap, but it is worth confirming rather than guessing.
Free tiers change their terms more often than paid plans do — a platform can and does adjust free-tier limits over time, sometimes tightening them. This is a real, if uncommon, risk worth knowing about, covered further in the next lesson on what free actually costs you.
For a portfolio site, a learning project, a small personal project, or anything genuinely low-traffic, free hosting is very often the correct choice, not a compromise — this is precisely the recommendation given throughout the Career Skills course for deploying portfolio projects.