Sometimes, due to the system requirements of your software project(s), a development machine may not be suitable for properly testing or even running a demo of your project to a client or potential one. In such a case, you need a better environment for testing and staging your product.
There are several online services intended for the above purpose. In this article, we will review top the 5 websites or online services for hosting your software projects in 2024, either for free or at a certain cost, depending on your use case as well as project requirements.
Table of Contents
1. Heroku – Cloud Application Platform
Heroku, arguably the most popular of them all is a container-based cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). It is an elegant, flexible, and easy-to-use service that enables developers to deploy, manage, and scale modern apps.
It is fully managed, meaning as a developer, you don’t have to worry about the distraction of maintaining servers, hardware, or infrastructure–simply focus on building your product.
Heroku provides a variety of services, tools, workflows, and support in several languages, all intended to boost developer productivity.
It supports many programming languages such as Node.js, Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, Go, Scala, and Clojure. Besides, you can use any language that runs on modern Linux distribution with Heroku via a third-party build pack.
Heroku Key Features:
- Build and deploy.
- Private space – offers an isolated network, and dedicated runtime environments for enhanced privacy, power, and performance.
- Seamless and detailed access controls that give managers control, and ensure users have the access they need.
- SSO – it supports several identity providers such as Salesforce Identity, Okta, PingOne, Microsoft Active Directory, or PingFederate to manage developer access and authorization.
- Offers a single dashboard for managing your teams, resources, and performance, in different stages of development.
- Provides enterprise-grade support with highly responsive SLAs, plus expert help with scaling, application architecture design, white-glove onboarding, and so much more.
Whether you are building a simple prototype or a business-critical product, Heroku’s fully-managed platform offers you the simplest and fastest way to deliver applications to the market.
2. Nelify – Develop and Deploy Websites and Apps
Netify is an all-in-one, production-grade platform that enables you to combine your favorite tools and APIs to build sites, stores, and apps much faster. It allows you to employ any frontend framework to build, preview, and deploy to a global network from Git.
Nelify helps you to skip all the server setup and get straight to building your applications. It allows you to develop, review, and deploy web projects with your team using a unified workflow.
It helps you to solve CI/CD (Continues Integration/Continuous Delivery), production servers, backups and rollbacks, global CDN, staging environment, DevOps, and scaling.
Nelify Key Features:
- Build and deploy.
- Offers first-class support for every modern web framework.
- Offers a broad ecosystem of API interrogations.
- Also offers a command-line tool for you to manage your workflow from the terminal.
- Supports one-click build community or custom-built plugins.
- Supports collaborative deploy preview links created automatically for every deployment.
- Apps are published to be served across all Nelifys global edge locations, and.
- Empowers stakeholders to view and leave feedback about the progress of a project.
It is simple, to get started, you can use a ready-made template. Once you connect your Git repository provider, Netlify will clone the repository and deploy your new site automatically.
3. Vercel – Develop, Preview, and Ship Apps
Intended for front-end developers, Vercel allows you and your team to iterate quickly and develop, preview, and ship applications effortlessly.
It’s all about speed and reliability, so it frees you from time-consuming, unnecessary processes that slow your work, allowing you and your team to only focus on creating stuff.
Vercel Key Features:
- Build and deploy,
- Automatic Git integration – get a preview deployment for every Git push.
- Vercel functions – run server-side code on-demand.
- Vercel edge middleware – run server-side code before a request.
- Offers powerful analytics via Vercel analytics.
- Supports updating of content with redeploying.
- Support image optimizations.
- Supports edge caching to serve content as fast as possible.
- Zero-configuration support for 35+ front end.
4. Firebase – App Development Platform
Backed by Google, Firebase is an application development platform that helps you create and grow apps and games users love. It enables you to spin up your backend without managing servers.
Firebase Key Features:
- Build and deploy.
- Firebase databases.
- Machine learning infrastructure.
- A variety of hosting and storage solutions.
- Several cloud functions.
- Allows you to release and monitor with simplified testing, triaging, and troubleshooting.
- Also allows you to carefully roll out features, monitor adoption; pinpoint, prioritize, and fix stability and performance issues, and.
- Supports user engagement through rich analytics, testing, and messaging campaigns.
5. GitHub Pages – Software Hosting Platform
Are you a user of GitHub? If yes, GitHub pages allow you to turn your repository into elegant websites to showcase your website, portfolio, documentation, or any other projects. It is a straightforward GitHub service to quickly spin up a website from your repository.
GitHub Key Features:
- Supports Jekyll, a static site generator with a simple build process. Jekyll allows you to quickly get up and running by using Jekyll Theme Chooser to load a pre-made theme. You can then modify the content and style later on, and.
- Allows you to configure a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site.
The service is available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations. You can also find it in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, as well as GitHub Enterprise Server.
Conclusion
That concludes our guide on the top 5 online services to host your software project in 2024. To reach us, as usual, use the feedback form below. Besides, remember to share with us any services not listed here but deserve to appear in the above list.
It feels more and more that Heroku is an eternal but old and heavy king, while in fact it has many better rivals since quite a while.
To name a few: Platform.sh and Upsun, Render, Aptible and even Fly.io in a way (though very non-entreprisy yet).
Hello,
Thanks for the article, but I miss codeberg.page, this is a platform like Github-pages, and in my opinion also very well done.
Greetings
Gerriet