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Free Blog Hosting using Netlify and GitLab: A Comparison with Other Platforms



Did you know this website is static and hosted for free? I build this site locally with WordPress, and use a static site generator to push new versions of the site up to Netlify. Since I only charge my nonprofit/ministry clients for my overhead costs, I try to keep these costs as low as possible. This setup allows me to completely remove hosting costs from my budget!




Free Blog Hosting using Netlify and GitLab




As we wrote in Should you start your R blog now?, blogging has probably never been more accessible to the general population, R users included. Usually, the simplest solution is to host your blog via a service that provides it for free, such as Netlify, GitHub or GitLab Pages. But what if you want to host that awesome blog on your own, HTTPS enabled domain?


This post is mostly a reminder-to-self of what porting this blog from GitLab Pages hosting to a custom domain entailed. The route I took was heavily influenced by the way I was serving the website at the beginning - using GitLab Pages on a project address. Migrating to a new domain I wanted to


Netlify was founded in 2014 and it focused from the start on hosting static websites. It attracted a lot of developers because of its generous free tier. A couple of years down the line, Netlify grew to be one of the most popular JAMstack and static website hosts around.


After testing each of these free React app hosting services, we think Netlify is the best of the bunch. It provides quick deployments with lots of features you might need. Right after that is Vercel which has lots of features and is fairly quick after the initial deployment. Then, we have Surge which is a minimal deployment tool that can be fairly cheap if you decide to upgrade.


The 'Serverless hosting' category is intended to show that static sites can easily be deployed using serverless solutions (i.e., Netlify, Cloudflare, GitHub Pages, etc.). Dynamic sites can also be hosted using serverless solutions (i.e., AWS Lambda), but it's a much more complex process.


Netlify offers free hosting of front-end web applications and they also provide the ability to purchase a custom domain name for your application. What I especially like about their service is that they provide HTTPS with all their hosting solutions.


In this guide, we are using Netlify for hosting and authentication and so the backend configuration process should be relatively straightforward. Add all the code snippets in this section to your admin/config.yml file.


Note that ox-hugo is not limited to exporting blog posts, but any content processed by Hugo. For example, my org source file also includes all the static pages in my web site - they are differentiated from blog posts simply by the Hugo section to which they belong, which is defined using the HUGO_SECTION property in my Org file.


But once you are ready to get your website out into the public domain, what are the options and how do you go about it? There are a couple of free options (with paid extras), as well as self-hosting if that is your JAM (geddit? Because 11ty is JAMstack... No? I'll move on...)


Netlify will take a few minutes to deploy your website but, once complete you are provided with a random .netlify.app URL to view your website. You can rename this or you can link a custom domain (even using Cloudflare).


Gitlab and Github pages are another great way of hosting your website for free. It takes a bit more configuration than Netlify, but if your website data is hosted on one of these services, there might an argument to reduce the number of services required.


Since Blazor comes with two different types of hosting models this makes it possible to host your applications using a static web host. The best part of that is that there are many alternatives for good static web hosting that is free. I this post I will focus on host provider Netlify and also on how to build and deploy using Azure Pipelines.


There are several hosting platforms. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. The choice of a hosting platform largely depends on the framework and whether the project you want to host is a back-end, front-end, or full-stack application. Similarly, choose a platform that offers a generous free plan when building a hobby project.


This article will explore the top five platforms with generous free hosting plans. We will highlight how to deploy to these hosting platforms, their strengths, and weaknesses, and explain why one might choose one platform over the other.


This section will explore the top hosting platforms with free plans for hosting your hobby projects. Though there are several such hosting platforms, I have picked the following because they have generous free plans and don't require a credit card or payment information to start using.


Vercel is one of the popular hosting platforms that enables front-end developers to develop, preview, and ship applications fast. It supports the most popular front-end frameworks like React, Next, and Gatsby. If you want to test or showcase a hobby project, Vercel also has a generous free plan.


In this section, you will deploy the refine application we created to Vercel using the command line tool. To start using the free plan, sign up using your email, GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket account. Follow the steps below to use the command line tool after creating an account.


Netlify is another popular platform for hosting static and Jamstack applications. For most front-end developers looking to deploy a simple static site, Netlify is almost always the first choice because of all the features provided with the free plan. It offers a diverse range of deployment options. The simplest deployment option is to drag and drop the production build on the Netlify UI.


As highlighted above, Netlify provides a simple UI and diverse deployment options. Some Netlify deployment methods include dragging and dropping the production build in the Netlify UI, using the command line tool, and continuous deployment from a Git hosting service like GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab.


We will explore how to use the command line tool in the steps below by deploying the example project to Netlify using the netlify-cli tool. You have to read the documentation to learn about the other deployment options.


Several features make Netlify an ideal choice for hosting static and Jamstack applications. Though we can't exhaust all of them in this article, below are some benefits of using Netlify as a hosting platform.


If you want to deploy a static website comprising HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other assets, Surge.sh is another platform worth checking out. It offers a generous free plan for hosting simple hobby projects.


GitHub is the most popular cloud-based Git hosting service. In addition to being a Git hosting service, GitHub also offers free static site hosting service referred to as GitHub pages. You can publish static sites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly from a GitHub repository. You can host static websites on the default github.io domain or use a custom domain name.


On the other hand, if you are looking to host a front-end, full-stack, or back-end application, Render is also an excellent choice. It is very similar to Heroku. Render comes in handy for hosting your hobby projects now that Heroku is about to drop support for their free plan.


There are several other hosting platforms like Digital ocean that we haven't covered in this article. They also offer generous free plans. However, you register with a credit card or payment method to use most of them.


The domain name for your published site will by default use a random identifier (e.g. mystifying-jepsen-fa4396.netlify.app). You can pick a more descriptive sub-domain (still using netlify.app as the main domain) or if you own another domain, assign that one to the site. These options are available (respectively) from the Site settings and Domain settings panels:


Now, commit and push your modified project (including _freeze, netlify.toml, and package.json). Assuming that you configured the project correctly in the previous step (i.e. Publish directory set to the _site or _book directory) then Netlify will begin rendering and publishing your site each time you push a new commit.


Your project may contain documents that can no longer be easily executed (e.g. blog posts from several years ago that use older versions of packages). These documents may need to have freeze individually enabled for them to prevent execution on CI.


In the first place is needed to store the project in a Git service which could be GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket; all of them are supported for Netlify. I've been using GitLab for this duties because it allowed me unlimited private repositories for free while GitHub not, but recently that changed and GitHub has private repos for free also. The reason is, sometimes you don't want the content of the site and the structure of it in a public repository.


According Netlify Documentation you only need in your tag the addition of an attribute data-netlify="true", also the tag needs a name attribute so you can name the form, each form must have a different name because it is used by Netlify to track the information received, and include a hhidden input with the name="form-name and using as value the name of our form.


In this post, we learned 6 different ways to host our next web application for free. The 6 ways presented were GitHub Pages, Vercel, GitLab Pages, Netlify, Firebase, and Render. I personally am still hosting most of my stuff on my own private server (there will come a post on this soon as well), but I started to transition to some of the solutions named above. Mainly GitHub Pages for static sites because it is so easy to do (and I have GitHub Pro) and next I want to try to use Netlifys free tier for some of my next projects.


[00:00:20]For this, we're going to need a few things. Since we're starting right at the very beginning of deploying a site, let's make sure we have a few things first. You're going to need a Netlify account. You can go to netlify.com, click on this Get Started button, and you'll have a chance to sign up. You can do that by authenticating with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, a bunch of different ways where you can create an account using your e-mail account. I'd recommend using a Git provider for this, since we're also going to be connecting to a Git provider for this lesson as well. You can do that. You can go off and get a free account either with GitHub, if you prefer-- You may already have one of these. You could do the same thing with GitLab or, indeed, Bitbucket. There are many options available to you, but you're going to need somewhere to have access to a Git repository and, of course, a Netlify account before we get started. Now, once we have those things, let's look at an example website that we're going to deploy. 2ff7e9595c


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