Is there a cloud computing service that provides a free tier that doesn't need a credit card? I like to maintain a personal website, and I've had to periodically hop from one platform to another.
I started on free.fr, my parents' ISP, with a web page built in iWeb. But then I wanted a .com domain.
I moved to Wordpress, but that didn't let me customise the layout.
Then I moved to Google App Engine (appspot), which is good, but it's blocked in China.
Then I moved to OpenShift (rhcloud), which was great while it lasted. It wasn't just for hosting a static web page - I could SSH into the server, at last! But it shut down the free tier.
I tried Heroku, but I'm getting warnings about 80% of monthly usage even when there's no content there, just a redirecting page.
Currently I'm using Github Pages, but I worry about how Microsoft will try monetising that. It's also a pity not to have SSH, FTP, or SQL - all my apps (e.g. Pingtype) have to run on the client in localstorage.
The company I'm working for spends over $3000 per month on AWS.
Whenever I read about these "free giveaway" AWS coupons that require registering with a credit card, I just think that there's going to be a nasty fee like this. So in practice I just run things locally on my laptop. If there's a better provider, please tell me though! It's been a few years since I last checked the options, and moved everything over to Github.
Netlify does what you want for static sites. I like it better than GitHub Pages because you can just drag and drop a folder to deploy; it's not necessary to deploy through git pushes.
Netlify.com is pretty great for static websites. Its free tier gives you something like 100GB data bandwidth forever. But it does not give you access to SSH - its a managed service. I think you'll have a hard time finding any service willing to deploy virtual machines for free, without a credit card. However Vultr has $2.5 instances, which are basically foh free and can be resized and rebooted in a few seconds.
Are you specifically looking for something free? Or are you just trying to avoid waking up to a massive credit card charge?
If you don't get a lot of traffic, I'd go for an Amazon LightSail instance. $5/month includes 1 TB of data transfer. If you really don't like AWS, Digital Ocean has similar offerings.
Does AWS allow you to pay with pre-paid Visa/MC cards? Could use one of those to pay for the account to avoid a surprise bill from draining your bank account.
Ideally something that doesn't need a credit card to register, yet has paid tiers to allow scaling up if there's demand. A prepaid credit card sounds like a decent idea; if I had less money in my TransferWise then I could probably use that.
I started on free.fr, my parents' ISP, with a web page built in iWeb. But then I wanted a .com domain.
I moved to Wordpress, but that didn't let me customise the layout.
Then I moved to Google App Engine (appspot), which is good, but it's blocked in China.
Then I moved to OpenShift (rhcloud), which was great while it lasted. It wasn't just for hosting a static web page - I could SSH into the server, at last! But it shut down the free tier.
I tried Heroku, but I'm getting warnings about 80% of monthly usage even when there's no content there, just a redirecting page.
Currently I'm using Github Pages, but I worry about how Microsoft will try monetising that. It's also a pity not to have SSH, FTP, or SQL - all my apps (e.g. Pingtype) have to run on the client in localstorage.
The company I'm working for spends over $3000 per month on AWS.
Whenever I read about these "free giveaway" AWS coupons that require registering with a credit card, I just think that there's going to be a nasty fee like this. So in practice I just run things locally on my laptop. If there's a better provider, please tell me though! It's been a few years since I last checked the options, and moved everything over to Github.