💬 How I put my first website online for free

I built a small portfolio site on my laptop and then sat on it for 2 months, scared hosting would cost money. A friend said just try it, so one evening I put it online with Vercel. Took about 15 minutes. I connected my GitHub account, picked the project and clicked deploy. No card asked for, which surprised me. After that every time I pushed new code the site updated by itself. I felt like a real developer. Then I tried Netlify for a second site. The contact form part was easy, I didn't need a backend. GitHub Pages worked fine for my resume page. It's only for plain pages, so nothing with a server. For my Node project I used Render. The free one goes to sleep when nobody visits it. The first load after a break takes around a minute, so I warn people before sharing the link. For the database I used Supabase with the same project. I didn't have to pay anything for my college work. Free plans change, so check each site's page before you rely on one. I'm just telling you what I used. A live link on my resume got me more questions in an interview than my marks did. The interviewer opened it on his phone right there and scrolled through it for a couple of minutes. I only paid for a domain name later, and it wasn't much money for the year. The default address from each site works fine if you don't want to spend at all. If you've built something and it's sitting on your laptop, put it online this week. Which one are you using? I'm curious if anyone found a better free option than these.

I used GitHub Pages for my first site and it was enough for a long time. The only trouble was that my page address had my username in it, which looked odd on a resume. I changed my username before applying for internships and the old links broke for a week. So pick a clean username before you share anything with a recruiter.

Did the same with my final year project and it helped more than I expected. A recruiter opened the live link during the call and asked me questions about the buttons and pages. Much easier than explaining code from memory. My only warning is to test the link on your phone first. Mine looked broken on mobile for a week before a friend told me.