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Hosting a Free Website Forever on Google Cloud Platform

A Quick Instruction Guide on Free Hosting

Alan Liu
4 min readMar 11, 2023

If you’re looking to make your own website, perhaps for a little more customizability or functionality than Wordpress or Squarespace, you’ll first need to understand a little more about how websites work.

When you go to say, Google.com, there are three main components at work. Google hosts a server somewhere that provides the content. There is a host that connects your server to the rest of the world wide web. And finally, there might be a domain that makes your host easier to remember.

For example, if we applied this to phone calls, a domain might be someone’s name in your contacts, a host could be your cell service provider and the server would be the person picking up on the other side of the phone call.

I’ve previously went over how to create a website, unfortunately, since then, the hosting portion on Heroku has removed its free tier. There are a bunch of alternatives online, but they often have harsh resource constraints.

The conclusion I personally came to was to use Google Cloud Platform’s Free Tier. With this guide, you’ll be able to put together the hosting for your website in < 30 minutes. Obviously, they don’t make it too easy to set everything up for free, so here are…

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Alan Liu
Alan Liu

Written by Alan Liu

CEO/Cofounder @ Health Harbor | Formerly Nuro/Facebook/Google | Yale ’18 | alanliu.dev

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