As far as I know there is a good amount of companies that host websites for free( github pages, cloudflare pages, other hosting companies) even intel uses github pages for hosting clear linux website.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    0·
    5 months ago

    Free hosting has been a thing for a long time. I remember having some free PHP4/MySQL hosting and they gave you like 50MB of storage space for your stuff 20 years ago.

    GitHub pages and others all have some terms saying what you can and can’t host using their services. It makes sense for Intel as it’s an open-source project and fits GitHub’s goals. People can contribute to the website on GitHub, and when the PRs are merged it gets deployed automatically.

    If you’re any sort of serious about your online presence, it makes sense to pay for hosting because that comes with more features, support, and certain guarantees about performance and uptime. If your business relies on it, even if it’s just a static site with your phone number and email on it, why not throw in that $5/mo on a VPS or a hosting company that’s contractually bound to provide the service to a certain level?

    If everyone used free hosting whenever they can, it would become too expensive to run and provide for free. Most hosting providers that provide a free tier use it as a lure for you to grow into their paid offerings. Like, basic Cloudflare is free but downloads and video streaming through their free tier is technically against ToS. You need a paid plan to do that, and get more caching capacity, more uptime guarantees (CF basically rolls things to free tier first as if it breaks, it doesn’t affect paid customers so you’re doing free testing for them).

    Free tier makes sense for individuals to learn and stuff, and I greatly appreciate having had access to free hosting for a solid 10 years. But I’ve moved on, I can afford my own servers, and there’s nobody to go under and shut down the service or tell me I have too much traffic and kick me out. You get what you pay for, after all.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      basic Cloudflare is free but downloads and video streaming through their free tier is technically against ToS.

      Are you sure that’s still the case?
      There doesn’t seem to be anything like that here anymore: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

      But in the past there was clause 2.8:

      2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content

      The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.