Choosing the best free hosting service for your React application

Are you looking for an easy, fast and scalable way to launch your React app? By using serverless hosting solutions, you can go live quickly, deploy updates quickly, and drastically reduce app delivery costs.

Hosting services for your React applications for free

As component-based frameworks like React gain popularity, there are more serverless hosting solutions available. There are currently three major cloud platforms: Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. In recent years, there has been a shift towards dedicated frontend hosting services, which require less time and effort, and most include CI/CD tools.

Let’s dive into these free React app hosting options for you or your company

1. Netlify

As a static website hosting platform, Netlify was founded in 2014. Due to its generous free tier, it attracted many developers. Over the course of a couple of years, Netlify grew to become one of the most popular static website hosts in the world.

Advantages and disadvantages of Nelify

One of the fastest services we tested is Netlify, which is easy to set up and deploy. The downside is that you must upgrade to a paid plan if you want collaborators or a team.

2. Firebase by Google

A real-time storage platform, Firebase is a Google service. In addition, it supports preview URLs for branches your team is working on, as well as hosting static websites and Express.js microservices. The deployed content is served over a CDN network, similar to Netlify, Vercel, and others.

Advantages and disadvantages of Firebase Hosting

Firebase is fairly simple to use, but the questions you need to answer when setting it up in your project are a bit confusing. The other advantage of Firebase is that it deploys quickly and generates a URL where you can view the deployed files. Additionally, the CLI makes it easy to automate deployments with GitHub Actions.

3. Vercel

Since it was founded in 2015, Vercel (originally known as Zeit) has become a household name. Their team maintains Next.js, a popular React framework. For non-commercial websites, they offer a free tier, as well as serverless functions using the Edge network.

Advantages and disadvantages of Vercel

As soon as Vercel caches the installation portion of the deployment process, it becomes one of the fastest services. Because of caching, it displays preview deployments for every branch you push.

4. AWS Amplify

Amplify offers access to some of AWS’s cloud products, and it is advertised as easy to use. As use cases evolve, you can leverage the breadth of AWS services with AWS Amplify to quickly build, ship, and host full-stack applications.

Advantages and disadvantages of AWS Hosting

The deployment specification doesn’t recognize the baseDirectory out of the box, so you’ll have to edit it. I’m personally not a fan of the UI, but it does seem clunky. The fact that a lot of other AWS web services are within arm’s reach makes AWS Amplify a very promising service.

5. GitHub Pages

With GitHub Pages, you can easily create a personal website or publish documents directly from GitHub. There are a lot of people who use it to deploy simple sites with minimal investment. It’s great for static content. A public project can use it for free and it is an inexpensive and fast way to host a website.

GitHub Pages: advantages and disadvantages

We will deploy your project inside a subdirectory of our free domain within GitHub if you’re deploying a project that differs from your username. In addition, you must write additional code to handle the logic of being inside a subdirectory.

Currently, it does not support continuous deployment out of the box, but you can set it up. Changes can be deployed quickly once it is set up.

6. Surge

Several years have passed since Surge launched. They offer a simple service that deploys static websites with only a few commands. Paid plans are available for 30$/month, but the software is free to use. Stoicism is what makes the tool so powerful. Install surge and run it with surge. No complex setup is required.

Surge: advantages and disadvantages

You don’t need to adopt a separate interface and it is fast and simple, but it doesn’t suggest a URL.

What do we choose 

• Nelify

• Vercel

• Firebase

As a result of testing each of these free React app hosting services, Netlify stands out as the best choice. With it, you can deploy quickly and take advantage of lots of features. There is then Vercel, which is fairly quick after the initial deployment and has lots of features.