Ask HN:Where can I find free web hosting for developers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995261

by JohnSmith2013 • 13 years ago

11 19 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

My daughter is just starting her career and I wanted her to be able to get some work done without setting up her laptop as a development machine. She currently uses windows and is starting to use Linux but I want her to be able to get started right away.

sdsk82• 13 years ago

github, it provides hosting for her websites and source codes!

X42• 13 years ago

http://bitbucket.org is probably better.

sdsk82• 13 years ago

I have the same opinion, but she need a web hosting too

tokenizerrr• 13 years ago

Maybe http://neocities.org/ for starters.

However I believe a local xampp install will be better for the long run. It's fairly effortless to install, gives a nice control panel to turn it on/off and it's very easy to edit and see your changes.

FaisalAbid• 13 years ago

heroku.com

X42• 13 years ago

Funny, I just looked for that. Make her take the red, not the blue pill Morpheus. Let her solve problems on her own, don't instruct, but give usefull hints. If she has or you have any question, just ask, don't be shy. I or someone else is sure there to help (just in case you/she need it).

For easy php stuff: http://www.square7.ch/

A real shell and more: http://shells.red-pill.eu/

(Btw. I recommend SuSE or Ubuntu for the beginning, Sabayon, Gentoo or Arch later when she's good enough and wants more. But I'm sure she would perform well on a Mac too, Macs teach you to become a consumer though)

   I recommend her to NOT install LAMP or XAMP.

She should use a prebuilt appliance from http://turnkeylinux.org instead. That will teach her howto sftp too. KDE and Gnome integrate sftp into their "Explorer", just ask or google and you will find howto do use that without a "FTP-Client".

ersoft• 13 years ago

If you are asking about developing in the cloud, there are two options:

https://www.nitrous.io/ or https://koding.com/

On Koding it requires an invite, but I have a couple of invites.

meadhikari• 13 years ago

Can you please send a Koding invite, can not find your email on the profile page, mine is salik.adhikari@gmail.com

JohnSmith2013• 13 years ago

Thank you so much!!

LarryMade2• 13 years ago

First thought is if shes serious about being a developer

a) setting up a development system is a good and necessary skill to have for a web developer. As other posts mentioned XAMPP, WAMP, etc are good methods to do it painlessly. Having a development machine makes development way easier as you can turn on error reporting, use interactive debugging tools, etc. things that are not as possible on a 3rd party host.

b) getting some inexpensive hosting is a good thing for her career development. There are some quite reasonably priced hosting out there, I hear Dreamhost name a lot in that respect, I myself use Bluehost, quite good and inexpensive. Experience dictates to stay away from GoDaddy they are kind of the bad side of town internet wise with hard-sell pushing of services and misleading/confusing management pages.

Being a developer isn't just having everything set up and ready to "make stuff" you have to learn a little bit of how it works underneath too.

lazylizard• 13 years ago

appfog???

Splendor• 13 years ago

You can host webpages (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) free from Google Drive: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2881970?hl=en

zachlatta• 13 years ago

If you're looking to host static pages, http://neocities.org/ is great. For anything more I'd recommend Heroku.

antonio-R• 13 years ago

https://www.heroku.com/

https://www.cloudcontrol.com/

https://www.openshift.com/

All of them allow you to host your projects.

boneheadmed• 13 years ago

Here is a site I'm going to be trying out. Has PHP 5, MySQL 5, ASP.NET. It's free. https://secure.biz.nf/order.php

dholowiski• 13 years ago

Come on, get her a real server, vps at least. If you look hard enough you can find one for $10 a month, less if you pay for a year. Do you really want her to waste her time struggling with all the crap that comes with 'free'?

Plus there is the added experience of server administration, which she should know at least a little about, if she wants to learn development.

argonaut• 13 years ago

Heroku is pretty much standard for getting web apps up painlessly. The last things you want is for a novice to get buried under devops hell. For simply hosting static HTML/CSS/JS, I would use GitHub Pages.

MrMeker• 13 years ago

I just started using Nitrous.IO to develop for AppEngine. It itself is not hosting but it is a free development box. https://www.nitrous.io/join/ll8ET-M6wvU

dirktheman• 13 years ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned this, but AWS offers one year of free EC2 usage.

Ask HN:Where can I find free web hosting for developers?

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