Cloud Hosting

Many companies claim to offer free cloud hosting, yet few offer anything worth using. What good is a free service when what you get is disappointingly unreliable and excruciatingly slow? The best free cloud hosting services actually let you try their platforms, without any trickery or false promises.

Thats why we tested the biggest free cloud platforms thoroughly, cutting them down to the top six. Ive detailed exactly what youll get with each platform and how you can maximize its potential. Take a look below for all the details.

Keep in mind, though, that every free cloud hosting platform has limitations. Youll likely be working with a tiny amount of resources, and you cant expect any reasonable level of customer support. For serious projects, Id recommend a paid option. It is possible to pay budget prices and still get the full power of the cloud keep reading to learn how.

Despite the lack of a forever free plan, Kamatera offers the best overall value. For just a couple of dollars per month, you can get a fully customizable cloud instance without any limitations and great performance to back it up.

Like many cloud hosts, Kamatera charges by the hour. This gives you full control over your servers overall pricing you can quickly scale your server up or down to meet your exact needs and budget. You can try this out for yourself with Kamateras free 30-day trial, supported by a dedicated account manager who can answer any queries.

Additionally, the performance tests in our Kamatera review revealed loading times of a single second, along with perfect uptime. Kamatera is among our top-rated cloud hosts for 2022 for a reason: it offers lower prices than much of the competition, along with comparable, if not faster, performance.

GearHost claims that it was made with love in Arizona. While Im generally skeptical about things made with love in Arizona, I tried the service out and was really happy with what I saw. It took me minutes to get on-board and launch my free cloud instance, and the entire process was extremely well thought of.

The service has five different cloud plans, with the basic one being completely free to use, for life. After choosing the free plan, all it took to get started was a quick signup form and basic email verification. Some of the other services on this list require your credit card as an insurance policy, but GearHost didnt ask for any payment details of any kind.

Keep in mind that theres no root access available, so youll be relying solely on the interface for performing configurations. There are limitations to this approach. For example, you wont be able to use development environments that arent .NET or PHP. Then again, it also simplifies the process of getting your cloud instance online, as youll never have to use the command line. Read our expert GearHost reviewfor more details.

Amazons premier cloud web service, AWS, is divided into three products: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Beanstalk, and Lightsail. The last two are designed as easy-to-use platforms that utilize the cloud computing resources that EC2 provides.

The best part? EC2 has a free tier that offers complete access to a limited set of resources, allowing you to familiarize yourself with AWS service and configure it to your exact needs. The AWS free tier includes 12 months of access, during which youll get 750 computing hours a month. Impressive, and our expert thought so too. Read all about it in our detailed review of AWS.

The micro instance that comes with the free tier can run either Linux or Windows and is fit for low to moderate performance needs. This wont be enough for a production-ready site, but youll be able to install and test WordPress, as well as advanced frameworks like Django and Node.js.

Of all the companies on this list, none provide a service as streamlined and easy to use as Herokus. There are far fewer options and features to concern yourself with: Dynos make the building blocks of their service. In Herokus own words, Dynos are isolated, virtualized Linux containers. Theyre designed to execute code based on a user-specified command, and here there are only six types are available. The first one is completely free to use.

Its through this combination of zero cost and ease of use that Heroku becomes such a great option for students and developers. Once you sign up and get your dyno going, you can immediately get a runtime environment up. Multiple languages and frameworks, such as Python, Node.js, and Ruby, are available for deployment without any extra configurations.

The free dynowill net you 512 MB of RAM and 2 process types (equal to 1 vCPU), making it a great platform for school projects and general experimentation. Youll be able to run WordPress and similar platforms on a PHP environment, but youll find Herokus cloud instance to be slightly weaker than its competitors. See the results of our performance tests here.

Googles cloud service, GCP, offers a ton of products but it can get very confusing. The sheer number of options is sure to send novice developers back to the cozy arms of regular providers, so take a moment to decide if youre ready to get your hands dirty.

Compute Engine instances are going to be your best buddies for building a WordPress website, and the free tier is always free. Youll get one f1-micro instance per month on the free tier, and it offers a surprising amount of storage space to play with. See what users think here.

Googles free GCP tier is an excellent option if youre looking for free cloud hosting for developers, but youll need to be in the United States to get the most out of it. Youll only get US-based cloud instances, and your bandwidth wont be available to destinations such as China or Australia.

Red Hat, known for the popular Red Hat Linux distribution, used to have an always free starter plan for its reliable cloud platform. The starter plan is no longer available, but there is a 30-day free trial of OpenShift Online Pro, so Red Hat OpenShift still makes it onto the list if only because its one of the most powerful cloud instances available.

Its quite a formidable setup, but your machine will go into hibernation after 30 minutes of inactivity. After your 30-day trial, your subscription will automatically renew but if you cancel before the end of the trial period, you still get the full 30 days to evaluate Red Hat OpenShift.

The discontinuation of the free plan is a disadvantage, but it doesnt stop OpenShift from being the best cloud hosting for students available today. The platform is geared toward rapid development (not as much as Heroku, but much more than AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure), and can ably run almost any test project or school app you can conjure. You can use it with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, too and Red Hat and AWS have announced a partnership that will more closely integrate OpenShift with AWS.

Azure offers a free product system very similar to AWS: Some are free for 12 months, others for life, and some are available for trial through the use of credit. Among the cloud resources that are free for 12 months, youll find Linux virtual machines, storage space, databases, and bandwidth.

Azures generous free resources allotment, specifically the bandwidth, make it a great place for projects aiming for production-readiness. The resources youll get for free (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 5 GB space) are actually more than what a lot of shared hosting providers offer on their intermediate to advanced plans!

Whats the catch? No catch really, except the one that affects all of these cloud providers these platforms were not built for the novice user. It takes expertise, knowledge, and a lot of time to get everything working together nicely read about our experts experiences in the full review.

If youre just looking to experiment, or youre developing projects for your school or as a hobby, theres really no need to commit to a paid plan. These free plans are powerful enough to handle most of what you can throw at them, and youll learn a lot by using them. Red Hat OpenShift and Heroku are my personal favorites.

On the other hand, if youre looking to get a production-ready cloud environment going, the free cloud hosting providers will probably not be enough. Your resources will be heavily limited, you wont be getting much support, and some services are prone to hibernation after a period of inactivity.

For such cases, Id highly recommend at least trying out Kamteras free trial. Youll get 30 days to try out a powerful cloud instance that can be scaled as you please. Id consider setting up the server youll need, and see how much this would cost outside the trial. For entry-level servers, you can enjoy some very low prices.

Still stuck? Heres a nifty table to help you out.

FAQ

Why should you pay for cloud hosting?Free cloud platforms typically have heavy limitations on resources, along with a lack of support and reliability issues. If youre looking to run anything other than a few simple prototypes, a paid solution is likely the better option. You can get cloud hosting for cheap, especially if you take advantage of the latest deals for January 2022 on our coupon page.Is cloud hosting faster than shared hosting?In most cases, yes. Most cloud hosts offer you dedicated resources that do not need to be shared, allowing them to offer faster and more reliable performance. That said, shared hosting offers generally lower prices along with more user-friendly platforms. Check out our list of the best web hosting services for our top picks.

Read more here:
6 Best Completely FREE Cloud Hosting Services [2022 UPDATE]