Free Web Hosting
These are the best free web hosting providers according to our team of experienced professionals.
All of these services are free to use, normally provide a free subdomain, but also support using your own custom domain name at zero extra cost.
Google AppEngine
Part of Google Cloud Platform, AppEngine is a PaaS service for developing and hosting web applications on Google infrastructure (for everyone else). It supports web apps written in Go, PHP, Java, Python, JavaScript (Node.js), and many other runtimes. You have to enable billing (i.e. provide a credit card), but the alotted free quota is sufficient and hard to exceed with legitimate traffic, unless you already have thousands of visitors per day.
In order to qualify for always-free tier, make sure to choose the standard environment (not flexible) when signing up.
GitHub Pages
If you're at all skilled at coding, you might look into Git if you haven't already. GitHub (now a subsidiary of Microsoft) offers GitHub Pages. This is a service where your purely static website (i.e. one built completely in advance, using any of the many static site generators, with no server-side computing logic) can be built using GitHub CI recipes in a "serverless" manner and afterwards deployed to be served from their CDN across the globe.
Similar services are GitLab Pages, Cloudflare Pages, and Netlify. Whereas GitHub only supports serving pages for public repositories, GitLab supports private repositories too, and Cloudflare can work with any (private or public) git repository you give it access to. It also supports free edge-network computation via its serverless workers.
Byet Host
Byet Host is one of the oldest free hosting providers around. They support the standard LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — good enough for hosting websites based on WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, Magento, Mediawiki (i.e. Wikipedia), Moodle (classrooms), Laravel, phpBB/vBulletin forum, or any similar PHP-based web app. A very similar service is offered by Hostinger.
Due to them being regularly misused by novice cyber criminals (e.g. phishers), you may find their service emails often roaming to your spam folder.
Blogger
If your planned website is mostly a not too complex blog, Google Blogger platform offers just about everything you need: themes with custom styling (including raw HTML), posts in categories with associated tags, moderated comments, custom domain, monetization with ads etc.
NameCheap
As a honorable mention, Namecheap, a sponsor of the almost free .com domain and one of the dominant names in the industry, offers affordable, reliable, almost free starter hosting with e-mail, unmetered bandwidth, website builder and CDN at approximately 2¤ per month, saving ~60% over the first two years.
This offer includes one top-level domain name free of charge!
Unless you like their subdomain and their forced branding (injected ads), we DO NOT recommend Squarespace, Wix, Webs, Weebly or similar free website builders. They offer quick visual results, but are really not worth their long-term costs.