The only thing I miss about being a student is student discounts. These days, it seems like there is a student discount on everything from salads to Spotify. Fortunately, web hosting is no different. If you’re planning to launch the next WordPress or TikTok, then this list of web hosting for students is the perfect place to start.
This is because selected hosts offer competitive prices, expansive feature sets, tools, and language options, so budding developers, designers, and marketers have room to grow.
Not only that, but you’ll have the freedom to build websites, applications, and experience in your field. In addition to saving money, you will also be enhancing the skills needed to land lucrative jobs.
Let’s see who gets the best grade.
We’d recommend all students stop by GitHub and sign up for the student’s pack. It comes with great offers for students, including domain names, courses, and free premium WordPress themes like our own Neve.
Best 100% free web hosting for students
InfinityFree

In July 2024, the popular free web hosting service 000webhost was discontinued by its parent company, Hostinger. As a longtime direct competitor to 000webhost, InfinityFree remained standing, and it is now arguably one of the best free web hosts out there.
Besides being a genuinely great option, it’s also unlikely to follow in 000webhost’s footsteps. The folks who run it have been doing so for over 12 years and in a forum post where they commented on the 000webhost shutdown, they even specifically cited students as being one of the main reasons why they plan to continue offering the service indefinitely.
Recommended plan 💡
There is only one plan, and it’s 100% free. No strings attached.
If you ever do need an upgrade, InfinityFree’s parent company is iFastNet. They offer premium hosting starting from $5.99 per month. It includes some free domains, unlimited disk space, 100 email addresses, and other features.
What do you get 📝
- 5 GB Disk Space
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- PHP 8.3
- MySQL 8.0 / MariaDB 11.4
- Free Subdomain Names
- Bring Your Own Domain
- 400 MySQL Databases
- Free DNS Service
- Free SSL Certificates
- Full .htaccess Support
As a huge plus, there are also no ads anywhere on your site, which is the most common trade-off with free hosting.
You can also use the popular Softaculous installer to activate WordPress or use the Site.pro website builder to build your site. In fact, you can do more with WordPress on InfinityFree than you can with a free WordPress.com plan. For example, InfinityFree comes with the latest versions of cPanel and PHP. You can even use it with Cloudflare to get your website a free SSL certificate.
If you ever get stuck with something, there is a knowledge base and a support forum where InfinityFree moderators and other users chime in to help.
Best cheap web hosting for students
Namecheap
While Namecheap started as a domain registrar, it has developed into a reliable, low-cost hosting provider. Indeed, they recently received an 8.03 (out of 10) from their users in our annual hosting survey. Some of the critical points in Namecheap’s favor are the monthly payment option and a free domain for the first year.
Beyond that, they are one of the few hosting companies that really seem to take intentional notice of students with their Namecheap Education Program. The program gives students of select universities a free .me domain for a year, plus some other perks. They even showcase some portfolios from students on their blog.
Recommended plan 💡
Stellar Shared Hosting, which costs $1.58 per month for the first year (billed annually). It renews at $4.07 per month in the second year. You can also pay month to month for $4.88 per month.
What do you get 📝
- Three websites
- 20 GB disk space
- Unmetered bandwidth
- Free domain in your first year
- Free SSL certificate in your first year
- AI tools
- 30 email accounts
- GitHub integration
- 50 FTP accounts
- 50 MySQL databases
- DNS zone editor
- Cron jobs
- Your choice of data center: US, EU, Singapore, or UK
- Backups twice per week
Like InfinityFree and many other hosts, Namecheap offers the 1-click installer Softaculous via cPanel. As a result, you can easily install popular content management systems like WordPress or forums like MyBB with the click of a button.
Namecheap also has a range of free and paid tools to build a website, including a CDN, an uptime monitor, and even a paid Business Starter Kit. While they offer a website builder, it doesn’t compare to the current crop of WordPress page builders available.
Finally, Namecheap offers you the ability to create applications with Node.js, Python, Perl, and Ruby, which means you could use your shared hosting to host web applications at an affordable rate.
Best web hosting with a student discount
InterServer

InterServer originally launched in 1999 by two high school students as a reseller hosting company. Even though they’ve grown into a much larger business since then, they’ve never lost touch with their student roots.
Back in September 2016, the company launched a generous student web hosting program 1, and they’ve been continuing it since then.
The details are simple: if you’re an actively enrolled student in an accredited U.S. university, you can get an entire year of free web hosting. After the first year, the plan renews at InterServer’s normal rate, which is still affordable on an average student budget.
Recommended plan 💡
The entry-level standard web hosting plan is free for students in the first year. Starting in the second year, it costs $7 per month. There are no discounts for long-term contracts, which means you can pay for your hosting from month-to-month without having to worry about being locked in.
What do you get 📝
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited Email
- One-click installer for 440+ applications
Overall, InterServer’s one year of free student hosting is a great option for U.S. based university students. After the year is up, if you find that $7 per month is too steep, then you can always transfer your site to a cheaper hosting plan with another company.
Best VPS hosting for students
IONOS
IONOS sometimes flies under the radar when people talk about hosting. However, if you’re looking for the most affordable way to begin dabbling with virtual private servers, then IONOS is tough to beat.
The entry-level plan costs less than even the most dirt-cheap shared hosting plans. Even though the specs are modest, they are adequate enough for a student with basic web hosting needs or a student looking to gain hands-on experience managing a server. If you outgrow it at some point, there are plenty of higher plans, scaling all the way up to 12 CPU vCores, 24 GB of RAM, and 720 GB of NVMe storage.
Recommended plan 💡
The entry-level VPS XS plan is a perfect place to start. At only $2 per month, it will cost you less than the espresso you’ll order when tinkering with your server.
What do you get 📝
- 1 GB RAM
- 10 GB NVMe storage
- 1 CPU vCore
- Unlimited traffic
- 99.99% uptime guaranteed
- Root access
- Your choice of OS: Linux (AlmaLinux, Debian, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu) or Windows
- Choose your datacenter: US, UK, Germany, Spain
- 2 email addresses with 2 GB storage each
The IONOS VPS plans are ideal for students who have admin knowledge or a lot of courage. IONOS does take care of security with DDoS protection, IPS/IDS, Wildcard SSL certificates, and a firewall, but it’s up to you to manage most other aspects of the server.
Best cloud web hosting for students
Microsoft Azure

When it comes to cloud hosting for students, there are three options: Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, or Google Cloud. Fortunately, they all offer dedicated student packages so you can take them for a test flight.
We recommend Azure specifically because it has an excellent tool-set with a smooth learning curve. Just as importantly, Microsoft makes it very easy to navigate and understand their student offerings.
Recommended plan 💡
There are only two student plans. Both are free and don’t require and credit card to register.
The more powerful one is reserved for university students and gives you $100 USD in credits. It renews every year for as long as you remain an eligible student. You can use the credits with most Azure products. In addition, you get access to certain software download benefits that are intended to support your education, non-commercial research, or efforts to design, develop, test, and demonstrate software applications for the above purposes.
The other plan is for high school students. While not quite as generous as the college plan, it still has plenty for the average teenager to take advantage of.
What do you get 📝
- 5 users with unlimited private Git repos
- 1 Standard tier Azure container registry with 100 GB storage and 10 webhooks
- Up to 10 web or API apps with 1 GB storage and 1 hour per day
- A dedicated MongoDB cluster with 32 GB storage
- 1 million monthly API calls free with Consumption tier
- Embed text reading and comprehension capabilities into applications with 3 million characters per month
Azure gives you free access to dozens of their products and tools. The above is a tiny sample of them. Many are free for as long as you maintain an account. Some are only free for the first 12 months of being a new customer. The ones listed above are all forever-free.
Best for students interested in deploying static sites
Cloudflare Pages

Cloudflare Pages is an excellent platform for students looking to host their web projects for free, especially those working with static sites or modern frameworks like React, Vue, or Vite (check out Cloudflare’s full list of supported frameworks).
Any static sites you publish through Cloudflare Pages get deployed via Cloudflare’s CDN for maximum global loading speeds. Cloudflare also adds in unlimited free SSL certificates, enterprise-level network security, a lightning fast DNS resolver, and all kinds of backend customizations. It’s so good, you’ll wonder how it’s free.
Recommended plan 💡
The Cloudflare free plan has more than enough for the average student developer to work with.
What do you get 📝
- Global CDN network
- Connect up to 100 custom domains
- 500 builds per month
- Serverless functions
- Instant rollbacks
- Git integration, including GitHub and GitLab
- Security features, including DDoS protection and SSL
- Analytics
- Redirect rules
Cloudflare’s seamless Git integration means that whenever you push changes to your GitHub repository, they sync with your live site. This makes it very convenient for ongoing projects. And if for some reason you make a mistake, it’s extremely easy to revert to any of your previous deployments in just a click.
It’s ideal for students who want to showcase their work or experiment with modern web development practices – all without the hassle of managing server infrastructure.
Best option for students launching web applications
Heroku

Heroku is an excellent option for anyone who is looking to build and host web applications. In the first place, they offer a standard free option for anyone looking to start hosting a web application. And equally important, they have an offer in the GitHub student pack.
Recommended plan 💡
The normal price for the entry-level Eco plan is a flat fee of $5 per month.
However, if you register with the GitHub Student Developer Pack, you’ll be eligible to receive platform credits worth $13 per month for 24 months (for a total value of $312).
You’ll be able to spend those credits on any Heroku product, including Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres, and Heroku Data for Redis®, but excluding third-party Heroku add-ons.
What do you get 📝
- 512 MB of RAM
- ~1,000 dyno hours per month
- Support for both Git and Docker deployments
- Support for up to two process types
- Automated OS patching
- Custom domains
- The free plan sleeps after 30 minutes of inactivity to preserve hours
- Free SSL
- An extensive library of add-ons, buttons, and build packs
Heroku runs all of its apps in ‘Dynos,’ which are Linux containers providing all of the compute resources, memory resources, an OS, and alongside the temporary filesystem needed to run your application.
It’s a popular option for beginners, who also benefit from over 200 add-ons for AWS file storage, data visualization, database response times, and much more. In addition, the buttons and buildpacks are extensive enough to help you connect to third-party services while also keeping your build processes efficient.
Final thoughts and summary of recommendations 💭
When it comes to the best web hosting for students, your choice will ultimately depend on what you want to achieve.
- InfinityFree is a forever free hosting option that you can use for a website or other projects.
- InterServer is a step up from InfinityFree, though it’s only free for one year.
- Namecheap is excellent for spinning up a simple site with few resource requirements.
- IONOS or Microsoft Azure are best for full server control.
- Cloudflare is great for experimenting with frontend frameworks and static sites.
- Heroku is your best friend if you want to build web applications.
All of the options above offer excellent opportunities to experiment with building, maintaining, and deploying projects, while being on a student budget.
Some of the hosts do have strict eligibility requirements so be sure to read the fine details regarding student plans or student discounts. On the other hand, there are also some that don’t have any restrictions whatsoever.
Either way, just pick the option that aligns best with your goals and take advantage. Whatever you build now could land you a job when you graduate.
Do you have any suggestions for finding great student web hosting? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
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