This is an archived blog post that is no longer listed. That's because this is an old post, from a previous blog I've had in this domain, years ago. I'm keeping this post up only in the interest of link preservation.

This post was originally posted on 24th January 2011. The original 2011 post is horribly out of date, so it's no longer slightly useful to share. So only the 2015 update is preserved here.

This post is starting to feel old, but since it was still getting so much traffic and comments (lost with the old blog, unfortunately), I decided that it could still be useful. The best I can do now without rewriting the whole thing is giving a short summary of my recent experience.

In short, the best free host that one can choose is probably Heroku, which provides many different environments (like PHP, to run a Wordpress install, or Ruby for a Ruby on Rails webapp). Its main problems are speed (if you’re not paying, your instance is put on stand by when no one is accessing it, which makes the next access very slow, as it has to wait for the instance to load again) and, if you’re planning on upgrading to a paying tier in the future, the prices aren’t the most competitive ones.

Now that I switched my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll, a great free host that I could have chosen is Github Pages. I’m not using it, so I can’t tell the pros and cons, but I believe that it doesn’t have the speed issues other hosts have. A possible problem for some is that in the free tier you have to disclose the full source code of your webapp.

All in all, my general recommendation still remains: if you’re looking for a host for anything serious or professional-looking, you’re better off willing to spend some money on it. Low-volume websites aren’t that expensive to host, and if you’re already paying, it’s much easier to scale in the future, and to get better customer support.

Update from 2024: Even the 2015 update is already outdated, as Heroku no longer offers a free plan. Go use some other PaaS like Vercel or whatever's hot right now (this is a moving target, bound to be outdated again soon). Or Github Pages, that one should still be ok.