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How to host lightweight apps for free

Pubs on May 26, 2017

When you look for web hosting services, there are many free options available. But there aren’t that many places where you can host full stack web ...
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Jan Kristian Jensen

I'm a big fan of pythonanywhere.com/

Their business modell is to make it super easy to run any Python-program, and in particular python web apps, in the cloud. Several tutorials on flask and other frameworks.

You can do anything - editing, runnning a shell, administering your web apps - in your browser. Paid accounts has ssh-access, and you can use git (and probably other version control systems, I guess) right out of the box.

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Adam Friedl

Heroku's ease of use is awesome, but, at least with the free version, your app goes to sleep if it doesn't receive frequent traffic. When you try to access it, it takes forever to wake up and load. If you're trying to demo something, it can make your app look really slow — even if it's not! Just something to be aware of.

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Ben Halpern

Yeah, this can be frustrating.

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hepisec

A few weeks ago I did a talk at a conference on a similar topic. I've written a sample Java application for the Google App Engine, where you can host small applications entirely for free. Maybe I'll find the time to do a write-up, as my talk was not recorded.

But all the code and presentation are available online:

Presentation (german) hepisec.de/devdays-2017/

Presentation (Google translate english) translate.google.de/translate?sl=d...

(Google translate destroys the code samples)

Code on GitHub: github.com/hepisec/gaecms

Demo site: gaecms-demo.appspot.com/

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Justin L Beall

Sweet tutorial!
I also could have used something as straightforward as this playing with Flask and Heroku.
Even a note of starting flask bound to port 0.0.0.0 would have saved me at least an hour of WTF's!

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Harley Hicks

It's funny, because I just spent an hour of this exact WTF scenario with Django this past week. :P

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mdickin

In the JavaScript world, I've found a lot of success with glitch.com. Very fast to set up a working Express instance, and there are templates for various projects: bots, websites, API integration, etc. Oh, and it's from Fog Creek (the creators of Trello and Stack Overflow)

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Christopher C. Johnson • Edited

On a related topic I'm thinking about moving my website over to GitHub pages using either straight up HTML, JS, and Bootstrap or Angular since they oddly support that. My biggest worry has been a database but I suppose there's no need if I make everything static.

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Daniel

Hey great post! Just to point out one thing which was not working for me:

You wrote: heroku create webchecker01 — buildpack heroku/python
Should be: heroku create webchecker01 -- buildpack heroku/python

I suppose it was because of markdown.

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Ben Halpern

Damn I could have used this when I was getting started.

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rezastd

great! thanks a lot

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LuisPa

For node applications i use Zeit.

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Rafael Sorto

The starter container on Vultr costs 2.50 USD per month. It doesn't get any better than that.

You are welcome :D