The Simplest And Cheapest Free Web Hosting Services

Dear Lifehacker,

I have a single HTML file that I would like to post online. I don’t need scripts or web editors or any of that. What is the best (and cheapest) way to post a plain, non-dynamic web page?

I see plenty of services for hosting files, but haven’t recalled one that could host a web site (.html). I would really appreciate your help.

Thanks,

Needing A Web Site

Dear Needing,

Remember back in the dinosaur days when everyone wanted a website? Then, with an asteroid-like fury, blogs came with a blazing wrath, eliminating all the free website providers — they just weren’t cool enough to survive. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to find some decent free web hosting providers and and clever hacks to do the trick today. We’ve rounded up some options for you below.

Find A Free Web Hosting Site

It’s been a long time since Geocities has been around. Geocities may not be around anymore, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t options to host a free and simple web site. Web hosting site FreeWebs morphed into Webs.com. The free package on Webs.com offers 40MB of space, 100 MB of bandwidth, five form submissions, a subdomain and web-based and email-based file uploading. They have a template for creating sites, or if you like a little more control, the more familiar file-like structure for you to interact with.

We also found ad-free Weebly, another promising free web hosting service. Weebly offers a free address URL, drag-and-drop widgets and customised templates to create your website simply if you don’t know any code. If you do, there’s a built-in HTML editor with a preview function so you can code to your heart’s content. Think Tumblr meets Webs.com — unlike a traditional web hosting service, there’s no information on the space and bandwidth you receive.

If you already have a domain name, you might want to check out Microsoft Office Live Small Business, which offers free web hosting. For zero dollars, you get free domain hosting, 500 MB of space and 100 email accounts. The service is free for up to one year and after that, you’ll need to pay $US15 per year.

Use Dropbox’s Public Folder

There are tons of clever tricks to use file-syncing service Dropbox, but here we’re using it to host an HTML file from the public folder. You’ll need a Dropbox account if you don’t have one.

Drop the static HTML file(s) into your Public folder, right-click the homepage file on your computer and grab the public URL. If you want to share one page, you’re done. If you want to host a site, that URL will now be your website’s homepage.

If you understand HTML, it’s easy to host a full, static website on Dropbox without grabbing all the public URLs for each file. In order to do employ this hack, use a backslash to have the server fill in the domain and subfolder in your link code. The result will have your HTML link code look like <a href=”/secondpage.html”> instead of <a href=”http:// http://dl.dropbox.com/u/######/secondpage.html”>. If you haven’t guessed it, ###### refers to your unique Dropbox public URL number.

Love,

Lifehacker

P.S. We’d love to hear what your favourite web hosting solutions are. Let us know in the comments below!