Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek
Published 1 minute ago
Arol is a tech journalist who currently works as a contributor at How-To Geek since 2022. He first began writing online for the short-lived portal of Spanish-language gaming forum Emudesc in 2013. Years later, in 2017, he got his true start in tech journalism working for a small Google-focused site called Pixel Spot. He transitioned to a news and feature writer role at XDA Developers that same year, where he worked until 2021 before making the jump to other websites.
Arol brings nearly a decade of writing experience, and the occasional hot take, to his writings. While he’s a technology lover at heart, he holds computer hardware and smartphones particularly close to heart. You’ll normally find him covering news, although he h…
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek
Published 1 minute ago
Arol is a tech journalist who currently works as a contributor at How-To Geek since 2022. He first began writing online for the short-lived portal of Spanish-language gaming forum Emudesc in 2013. Years later, in 2017, he got his true start in tech journalism working for a small Google-focused site called Pixel Spot. He transitioned to a news and feature writer role at XDA Developers that same year, where he worked until 2021 before making the jump to other websites.
Arol brings nearly a decade of writing experience, and the occasional hot take, to his writings. While he’s a technology lover at heart, he holds computer hardware and smartphones particularly close to heart. You’ll normally find him covering news, although he has also written the occasional deal, buyer’s guide, how-to post, and round-up. He’s also written for Android Police and MakeUseOf. He’s also a Political Science student. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him hitting the gym, trying to ace a new hobby, reading his textbooks, or traveling. You can reach him at me@arolwright.com.
When it comes to setting up free websites, there’s always a catch. But if you want a free, simple method to set up a free, static website for yourself or for a personal project, that’s relatively easy to do.
My personal favorite, however, is GitHub Pages. My own personal website is hosted using GitHub Pages. Here are a few reasons why you could check it out yourself as well.
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It’s easy to manage and deploy
Probably the main reason to check out GitHub Pages is that it’s just as simple to manage it as it is to set up any other GitHub repository. Because the service is directly tied to a GitHub repository, deploying a website essentially becomes a byproduct of saving your work. In a standard workflow, you simply create a specific branch—often named gh-pages or main—and any HTML, CSS, or JavaScript files pushed to that branch are instantly recognized as a web deployment. This eliminates the need for complex File Transfer Protocol (FTP) clients, third-party hosting dashboards, or manual file uploads that often plague traditional web hosting services. The barrier to entry is lowered significantly because the platform handles the infrastructure management entirely in the background; there are no servers to configure, no operating systems to patch, and no software dependencies to manually update. In fact, I personally manage my website just like I manage any other folder in my computer, and just commit the changes using the GitHub Desktop client.
The integration with GitHub Actions has also greatly modernized this process, allowing for sophisticated build pipelines that remain easy to trigger. Users can configure workflows that automatically compile static site generators like Hugo, Gatsby, or Jekyll whenever a commit is made. This means that you can maintain your raw source code in one state and have GitHub automatically build and deploy the production-ready HTML files to your public site without manual intervention. For those who prefer simplicity over automation, the platform also offers a built-in theme chooser and direct support for Jekyll, allowing users to write content in Markdown and have it rendered as a polished website automatically. This "docs-as-code" approach ensures that managing a website feels exactly like managing a software project, providing version history, rollback capabilities, and collaborative features like Pull Requests to review content changes before they go live. Pretty cool.
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It supports custom domains and HTTPS
While many free hosting tiers restrict users to generic subdomains that look unprofessional, GitHub Pages offers robust support for custom domains, allowing you to mask the default github.io address completely. This feature is critical for establishing a distinct brand identity or a professional portfolio, as it allows you to map a domain you own—such as www.yourname.com—directly to your GitHub repository. The process involves adding a simple CNAME file to your repository and configuring DNS records with your domain registrar. Once verified, the platform handles the routing automatically, ensuring that visitors who type your custom URL are seamlessly served the content from your repository. This capability transforms what is essentially a developer utility into a viable hosting solution for production-ready websites, blogs, and documentation hubs.
Of course, a domain is not free, and that would defeat the purpose of being a "fully free" website. But you can also just stick to the github.io subdomain it already gives you by default.
Equally important is the platform’s handling of security through automatic HTTPS provisioning. This part is actually free. In the modern web ecosystem, encryption is mandatory not just for security, but for search engine ranking and user trust. GitHub Pages partners with the non-profit certificate authority Let’s Encrypt to automatically issue and renew TLS certificates for your site. This occurs without any cost or manual maintenance from you. Whether you are using the default github.io subdomain or a custom domain, you can enforce HTTPS with a single checkbox in the repository settings. This feature ensures that all traffic between your users and your website is encrypted, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks and avoiding the "Not Secure" warnings that modern browsers display for unencrypted sites.
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It’s backed by GitHub’s CDN
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
The performance of a website is often dictated by the physical distance between the user and the server, which is why Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are essential for modern web development. GitHub utilizes a massive CDN to distribute your static assets, ensuring that a user in Tokyo and a user in New York experience similar load times. This backing effectively protects your site from crashing during traffic spikes, as the load is distributed across hundreds of points of presence rather than hitting a single origin server.
This architectural advantage offers significant reliability benefits that are typically reserved for paid enterprise hosting. Because your site is served via this distributed network, it gains resilience against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The CDN acts as a buffer, absorbing malicious traffic and mitigating threats before they can overwhelm the infrastructure.
Considering this is all free, it’s amazing. It allows personal projects and open-source documentation to scale and handle viral traffic events that would take down a standard, cheap shared hosting plan.
There are some cons, too
Keep in mind that GitHub Pages is not a universal solution and comes with distinct architectural limitations that may disqualify it for certain projects. The most significant constraint is that it is a static hosting service, meaning it cannot execute server-side code such as PHP, Python, or Ruby, nor can it interact with a traditional database like MySQL. This makes it impossible to host dynamic applications that require user logins, comment sections, or real-time data processing without relying on third-party APIs and JavaScript. If your project requires a backend to process forms or manage user sessions directly, you will hit a hard wall. Additionally, because the build process is public by default for free accounts, it may not be suitable for projects that require strict access control or private staging environments.
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Resource limitations also apply, preventing the platform from being used as a file dump or a heavy media host. GitHub imposes a soft bandwidth limit of 100GB per month and a recommended repository size limit of 1GB. While these limits are generous for text-based sites and documentation, they are insufficient for hosting high-resolution video libraries or massive asset collections. Furthermore, the build process itself has a timeout limit, meaning that extremely large static sites with thousands of pages may fail to generate within the allowed window.
Some people migrating from traditional web servers may also find the lack of fine-grained server configuration frustrating; there is no access to .htaccess or Nginx configuration files, meaning you cannot implement complex redirect rules or modify server headers directly. These constraints ensure the service remains fast and free for the majority, but they necessitate a clear understanding of the project’s scope before committing to the platform.
If all you want is a static website for your personal projects, however, this is just fine. Give it a spin.