Free hosting?! Rubbish, you say! Well actually, it does exist.
Setting up web hosting is enough of a hassle by itself, let alone having to pay for it too! The majority of websites out there have traffic levels low enough that they could really survive on free web hosting. The higher the volume of people coming through your website, the more you have to pay for a faster web server in order to keep your site loading quick enough and prevent the site from crashing.
With free web hosting, you obviously don’t get to boast the perks of having the fastest web server in the world, but you probably don’t need these perks if you’re reading this. The only downside is that if you for some reason have a large spike in your traffic, your pages might take a while to load. Also, if the webhosts servers are under a high load from other peoples websites, your site load time will probably reflect that to an extent.
So to get started, I recommend 000webhost [Referral]. After you sign up, navigate to Account Details and you will see the Nameserver details which you will need to forward your domain to. For example, if you have a domain with Godaddy, you will need to go to your control panel on their site, find “domain forwarding” and forward your domain to ns01.000webhost.com and ns02.000webhost.com. This step basically links your domain to your server.
After this, you might have to wait for up to 48 hours (though usually only a few hours) for your domain to be forwarded, you can check by going to your URL and see what page shows up. Once that is done, download Filezilla or any other FTP program, punch in your FTP details from 000webhost account details and viola. You get given 1.5Gb of space to play with, which is plenty for most applications.
Enjoy, and don’t party too hard now!