In this article, I will compare a couple of hosting platforms and my own experiences for deploying hobby projects.
When it comes to a hobby project, the following aspects are important to me:
- Price: The cheaper the better, because not many users will use these, they were created for demo purposes only
- Simple deploy, CI CD: As little energy as possible should be spent on maintenance. The exception is if we have a Devops project.
Github pages: pages.github.com
If you have a frontend project, it's the easiest to choose, it's the most convenient option, you don't have to leave GitHub and you can host your project with just one click.
Price:
- free
CI-CD deploy:
- Deploy automatically, branch can be selected, url generation.
- If our project needs to be built (because, for example, we used Typescipt or some kind of framework), it must be configured. You can create for example a "gh-pages" branch where the builded code will live and host it (also available some automation tool for this).
Frontend-backend hosting:
- Only frontend projects can be hosted.
- Docker is not supported
Railway: railway.app
If we use Docker, this may be the best choice.
Price: railway.app/pricing
- There is a free option
CI-CD deploy:
- Automatically deploy, branch, url generation can be selected.
Frontend-backend hosting:
- You can have both.
- Docker supported.
- Some dependencies are unallowed, e.g. I wanted to use yt-dlp, but I got an error: banned dependency. This is the disadvantage of the free plan, they try to improve shared hosting with this.
Linode: linode.com
If we want to configure our server ourselves, it is a good choice. I use it to expand my devops knowledge. A simple user interface than the big cloud platforms.
Price:
- Currently $5.00 / country is the cheapest
CI-CD:
We have to solve it ourselves.
Frontend-backend hosting:
- Both and anything else. We can even host game servers.
netlify: netlify.com
If you have a lot of pull requests, maybe this is the best choice because there is a feature that makes testing easier: docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews Deploys a preview page for every pull request and create a comment.
Price:
- There is a free option
CI-CD deploy:
- Automatically deployable Github project
Frontend-backend hosting:
- Mainly frontend but supports lambda functions
- Docker is not available
I am sill experimenting with different platforms, if you have a suggestion, leave a comment.