Top 5 Ways to Host Your Full-Stack App for Free

In the world of web development, bringing full-stack applications to life is a very thrilling experience. However, once you are done with code the next critical step is to find a reliable and cost-effective hosting solution. Fortunately, in the vast field of cloud services, there are plenty of platforms offering hosting options, allowing us to deploy and showcase our application to the digital world.

Before we start talking about the Top 5 ways to Deploy Full-stack Applications for free, let’s understand what Full-Stack applications are.

What are Full-Stack Applications?

Full stack applications are the software that includes both the front-end (client side) and back-end (server side) components along with database service management. So, in other words, the Front-End developer can be defined as one who has skills and knowledge of Client-side (Front-end) and server-side (Back-end) technologies and handling database operations.

We can break the key components of Full-Stack applications into

• Front-End: This includes the UI/UX development where users can interact with the application. The most common technologies used for Front-End development are HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or other libraries and frameworks like React or Angular, these frameworks help to make quick designs with less effort.
• Back-End: Back-End is responsible for managing server-side business logic along with database operations. Back-end development uses languages like Python, Ruby, Java, or PHP, or there are frameworks like Express (for Node.js), and Django(for Python) available in the market to make development fast and easy.
• Database: Full-stack developers should have knowledge of databases as well to store and fetch data from databases efficiently. Popular relational databases used by developers are MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite and popular NoSQL databases are MongoDB, and OrientDB.
• Communication between Front-end and Back-end: Servers are responsible for processing requests from the Front-end side, executing required logic, interacting with the Database, and responding back to the Front-end. This entire communication is done using API(Application Program Interface) which is included in server-side development.
• Deployment-Hosting: Once we are all done with Front-end and back-end development and database integration, the final step is to make applications available to end users. There are many paid and free platforms that can be used for deploying and hosting Front-End applications.

Top 5 Ways to Host Your Full-stack App For Free

Today in this article we will explore the top 5 ways to host our full-stack application for free. Whether you are an experienced developer looking to cut down the hosting cost or a newcomer eager to launch the first full-stack application for free, the following solution would be perfect for you.

1. Vercel

Vercel is a cloud platform mainly designed to help web, full-stack developers deploy and host their applications. It provides good performance and has a simple and straightforward deployment process. It offers serverless architecture, static website and front-end applications hosting, and serverless functions. It offers different pricing options from the Free tier to the Enterprise level. Let’s talk about some key aspects and use cases of Vercel.

1. Deployment of Front-end applications: Vercel is Front end developer’s first choice for deploying their applications(applications that are built with React, Vue.js, Angular, or other javascript frameworks). Developers can easily connect their Git, BitBucket, GitLab, or Azure repository and deploy their app with fewer clicks.
2. Serverless functions: Along with your front-end code, Vercel also allows developers to deploy their serverless functions seamlessly. Those functions could be written with languages like JavaScript, Python, GOLang, and many more. It provides cost-effective and scalable ways to add server-side logic to applications seamlessly.
3. Automatic HTTPS: Vercel also addresses the security concerns of developers by providing automatic HTTP for all deployed applications. This ensures that our applications and websites are served over secured connections. SSL certificates are renewed and provisioned automatically.
4. Custom Domains: Vercel provides easy configurations for custom domains of your deployments. It is very useful for branding requirements and it also allows you to serve your applications from a custom URL.
5. Global content delivery: Vercel provides Global Content Delivery(CDN) to distribute our application’s assets to various server locations across the world. This guarantees low latency access to your applications for users across the world.

Apart from above features Vercel also allows you to manage Environmental variables, Preview Deployments, Collaboration and Integration with repositories and many more features.

Limitations of Vercel

• Vercel is primarily designed for static sites and server less functions, it is a good choice for both these requirements but it would not be an ideal choice for an application with high server side requirements.
• Continue deployment builds might take a long time, which can impact deployment speed.

2. Railway

Similar to the Vercel, Railway is also a platform to streamline the deployment and hosting of Web applications. It provides an easy process to manage backend infrastructures, databases and services so developers can pay more attention to building their applications. It offers different pricing plans from Free to Custom. New users can take the platform for a spin by starting a free trial. The trial gives access to basic features and includes a one-time grant of $5.

Below are key features and use cases that Railway provides.

1. Front-end and Back-end Deployment: Railway simplifies the web applications deployment process. By just following some simple steps developers can deploy their applications. It also allows developers to connect their repositories.
2. Managed Database: Along with API deployment, Railway also provides managed database services, which allows users to easily setup, scale and manage their applications easily without caring about complexities of database administrations.
3. Developer friendly CLI: Railway also provides a CLI(Command Line Interface) which allows developers manage and interact with their Railway projects from terminals. So developers who are very comfortable with working with command terminals can take advantage. Developers can deploy updates, manage databases and many more things from terminals.
4. Easy Continuous deployment: Railway provides support of continuous deployment workflow, by easily integrating their Railway projects with version control systems like Git.This helps developers to deploy their updates automatically, with no manual steps.
5. Infrastructure as Code: Railway encourages the developers to use Infrastructure as Code(IaC) principle, This allows application developers to define and manage their infrastructure using code.This gives more flexibility towards more reproducible and scalable infrastructure setups.

Limitations of Railway

• Railway is not quite new compared to other platforms, so it might have less integration options then other platforms.
• It’s free tier has limitations on resources like CPU, which may impact scalability of larger projects.

3. Render

Similar to the Vercel and Railway, Render is also a cloud platform that is designed to deploy simplify deployment and scaling of web applications. Render gives support for multiple stacks like Javascript, GoLang, PHP , Python, Ruby, Mongo and many more. Render gives different kinds of service based on pricing plans selected by users. You can select a plan based on your requirments. Like other platforms Render also provides many features, so let’s have a close look around key features and use cases.

1. Managed Deployments: With minimal steps of configuration users can deploy their applications using Render platform.It is designed to manage deployments and scaling of applications automatically.
2. Multiple language and Platform support: Render gives support for many platforms and languages which makes it versatile for developers working for different stacks. This includes popular languages like Node.js, GoLang, Python, Ruby and many more.
3. Static Sites, Dynamic Apps with Database integration: Render supports both static sites and dynamic web applications. Whether you are building static websites or complex dynamic applications, Render provides hosting solutions for various use cases. Render also provides Database service integration, which allows developers to connect various databases like MySQL, MongoDB easily.
4. SSL Certificates and Custom domains: For secure communication over the network Render provides automatic SSL certificates. Users can configure custom domains seamlessly for their applications and allows them to serve content from personalised URLs.
5. Easy collaboration among team: Render is designed in such a way that it gives support to easy collaboration among team members. Multiple developers can work on the same projects and their changes can be deployed collaboratively.

Limitations of Render

• Free tier has limitations of resources like CPU, memory which can impact the performance of resource-intensive applications.

4. Fly.io

Next in our list of Full-stack app deployment platform is Fly.io, It is also designed to provide a global edge network. It also focuses on making it easy for developers to deploy their applications, reducing latency and improving performance. It provides a variety of plans that developers can select based on their requirements.

Let’s look into its features and use cases.

1. Global edge computing: One of the highlighted features provided by Fly.io and which make it different among other competitors is it operates a global edge computing network with strategically located data centres. Fly.io allows developers to deploy their applications which are closer to their end-users, with optimised performance and efficient latency.
2. Container-Based Deployment: Another feature that makes Fly.io different from others is it leverages the container technology for deployment, which means it allows developers to package their applications into containers, then Fly.io takes care of distributing and running those containers across its global network.
3. Anycast IP Addresses: Fly.io uses Anycast IP Addresses that helps in routing the traffic to the nearest data available data centres. This helps to achieve low-latency communication between deployed applications and users.
4. Custom Network Policies: With Fly.io developers have ability to define custom policies for their applications, which includes specifying how traffic should be routed, configuring load balancing and setting up securities.
5. CLI and API: Fly.io also offers CLI(Command Line Interface) service, so developers can use it to interact and manage their applications. With Fly.io along with CLI there is support for API for programmatic access, enabling automation and integration with existing workflow.

Limitations of Fly.io

• Fly.io focuses on global edge computing but free tier has limitations on resources like memory and locations affecting the large scaling applications.
• Fly.io is more focused on container based deployment, which might require additional configuration compared to other platforms.

5. PythonAnywhere

PythonAnywhere is a generally a cloud-based platform that is designed to simplify the hosting and management of applications crafted with Python. While it’s known for its robust support for Python applications, it can also be used to host full-stack web applications where the back end is implemented in Python and its frameworks like Django and Flask.

Key Features and Use Cases

• Python Hosting: PythonAnywhere provides a reliable environment for hosting Python applications, making it suitable for full-stack applications where Python is the primary language.
• Web Application Deployment: Developers can easily deploy their web applications on PythonAnywhere, making them accessible over the internet.
• Server-side Logic: For full-stack applications requiring server-side logic, PythonAnywhere offers the necessary support to execute Python code on the server.
• Database Integration: PythonAnywhere supports integration with various databases, allowing developers to store and manage data for their applications.
• Pricing Options: PythonAnywhere offers different pricing plans, including a free tier with limited resources, making it a cost-effective choice for developers.

Limitations

• While PythonAnywhere is excellent for Python-based applications, it may not be the best choice for applications requiring specific technologies or extensive customization outside of Python.
• The free tier has limitations on resources, which may impact the scalability of larger projects.

Conclusion

In the exploration of Top-5 platforms for Full-stack apps we have seen that each platform provides similar features,with different pricing schemes. Developers have to choose their platform based on their requirements. Regardless of the platform chosen by developers, the common point is the platform should have the ability to showcase your full-stack applications to the world with a feasible fees burden. The world of free hosting is very large and these discussed five platforms are gateway to get into the web application hosting.

Apart from discussed above platform there are more platform like Github pages, Firebase, which provide similar features with different pricing schemes.