We just covered a lot, and you may feel a little overwhelmed, but we have a few suggestions if you’re just beginning with web development. The following web hosting providers should give you what you need to get started.
When choosing a web hosting provider, experiment with simple demo projects and see what works for you and what doesn’t. Always make sure you evaluate your options against what you’re trying to build.
Remember that at the end of the day, all of these are just tools you can use. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so you might use some of these, you might use none, or you might use a mixture of all three — or even other solutions.
GitHub Pages (static site generator)
GitHub Pages uses the Git version control system and a static website generator called Jekyll to publish websites for its users, and it’s free. Because you can only publish static pages, you won’t be able to deploy your web applications here, but it’s good for blogs, your portfolio site, or possibly a compiled version of a React application that doesn’t require back-end code.
Heroku (PaaS)
Heroku is a PaaS provider that’s very popular with developers because it makes it easy to deploy full-stack applications with no worry about configuring servers.
Heroku will also give you a free trial, which is good for hackathons or if you have a web application that doesn’t get a lot of traffic.
Digital Ocean (IaaS)
If you want to scale your application and Heroku doesn’t fit your needs, Digital Ocean is a good option. Especially if you want to use an IaaS cloud provider but don’t want to deal with all the complexity that comes with some of the bigger providers. It’s easy to build your applications on Digital Ocean, and they have a lot of resources to help beginners get started.
