I wanted to explore how deep the web network is today. Natural for a curious programmer at the start of his career!! But, the catch is if you dive into a field like a web or android dev, most of its resources are free, unlike a field like IOT, Cloud, or even Cyber Security (here, certifications are crucial, buying which can make you go broke).
So, in this blog, we are about to explore resources that might be useful for a beginner wishing to learn all that is in the cloud. Let's begin!!
Most popular platforms
As a first choice for deploying your sites, you might want to host it in serverless platforms like Netlify, Heroku (earlier free), render, etc. These sites are PaaS (Platform as a Service) providers that provide a very beginner-friendly way of deploying apps.
Alternatively, if you want more control over how your app is running, you can opt for big cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Linode, DigitalOcean, etc. These are Iaas (Infrastructure as a Code) providers which give you a much wider range of control
Best Choices for you
Depending on your specific requirements you might want to go to a different provider. Typically it depends on your budget, knowledge, and several other factors:
If you are a developer and you do not expect much traffic on your site, you can safely opt for PaaS services. Both Render and Netlify provide freemium services for anyone to scale his/her application depending on the growing traffic. Both are my favorite options for a MERN/MENN stack site since the free tiers provide excellent options to host such apps
Now if you want to work on servers like Apache or Nginx, you can go with IaaS platforms. Here, depending on your expertise or curiosity you can divide your choices into two categories: One with platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure, and another with DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, etc.
If you want a dedicated remote machine for yourself which have a static IP assigned to you. In other words, it will be like a Virtual Machine freshly made and delivered to you. Here, you can set up a server of your own, with all the configurations maintained solely by you. You can choose the OS, you can choose to run it using Nginx or Apache, and set up your way of load balancing, forward/backward proxy servers, and much more. The only drawback I see here is that it's not free. Almost all of them charge a minimal amount of money, which makes it hard for everyone to access
Now, if you are still not satisfied, you can try out platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure. One of the main reasons it's my favorite is its free tier. One of the key differences between these platforms and a droplet in DigitalOcean is that you can configure an EC2 instance in AWS in many more ways than just purchasing a droplet. Till this point in time, all of the three providers have some free tiers to help you start a server and practice on your own. But, make sure to keep an eye on the cost.
Conclusion
Learning in today's world can be a bit costly. However, most of the companies provide a good number of services that are enough to give a kickstart to a new learning path. I hope this analysis helps you figure out resources if you wish to look into deploying your application.