Best hosting service for creating a website
 

I'm looking to make my first website. I need a hosting service. I've been looking around but can't seem to find what I'm looking for.

I want the service to be free, I want to write all the code myself (html, javascript, CSS) meaning that I don't want them to make the site and write the code for me... and... Well actually that's it.

Do any of you guys know of a good service for me?

It doesn't matter if the site will be accessible from search engines. I'm more or less looking for a playground to practice and sharpen my web skills writing HTML and <script></script> tags and such.

Thanks in advance!

What stops you from running Apache or NGINX at home?

As Emerson says, you don't need a hosting service for that - it's really easy to run a server on your machine, but you don't even need that for a basic HTML/CSS/JS site - browsers can handle local filesystems.

If it needs to be online, and you don't have a problem with Microsoft GitHub, you could just use GitHub Pages.

Otherwise I know HostMedia have a plan that only requires a £1 setup fee (no monthly costs) - they introduced the one-off setup fee to reduce scammers - but I've no idea what the service is like.

Dunno about best. I use neocities for mine.

You can put it online even from home. I registered a domain just for fun, less than a buck per month, currently it is pointing to my home IP, link is in my footer. If your ISP is blocking port 80 you can use alternative ports.

Man, how browsers are not blocking http traffic in 2021 is beyond me. Only shows "not secure". :|

In my experience, Firefox, at least, only reports “not secure” when calling https and there’s a problem with the certificate...or the content.
There are add-ones that will block non-secure sites, if that’s what you want.

I’d offer my hosting service...except it’s not free. :) ;). Otherwise it’d be a fit.

Pagonis,

what's the trouble, your ISP (Cgates) injecting ads into HTTP traffic?

OP, you might want to take a look at XAMPP.

I've used it to work on my website and try things out on localhost and it works quite nicely.

XAMPP is for Windows only, and should be avoided on GNU/Linux. While it can be installed on normal GNU/Linux systems, it circumvents the useful things like the package manager, at least last I checked.

But as for the hosting, it'll cost a bit unless you can self-host at home as already suggested. How much it costs depends on the extent of your site, it can be quite inexpensive on the low end. If you are just starting out, set up a static site generator and either Apache2 or Nginx on a local machine to create static pages. Then use rsync to mirror the local static pages to your hosted web server.

I use 2MHost. It is not free but well-worth the modest price.
Ed

So no server-side scripting? Well, that's easy...

Thinking more about it, the HTML + CSS can be done on any machine, even local host using Ngninx, Apache2, Flask, or whatever. Then you can modify /etc/hosts to simulate different host names. The utility tidy is of great use.

The script elements can be dealt with using a variety of tools. xmlstarlet is a good one, if you are able to stick with strict XHTML:

That one scans for and resolves the presence of any script elements, rendering the file safe for use.

 

To re-iterate what I said in post #3 - a web server is not required for local experimentation with a simple static site, because web browsers can browse and render local files just fine.

For local experimentation, it's only necessary to run a server if/when you want to move to dynamic content, modifying requests/responses, etc.