The honest guide to free hosting for Nepali sites — genuinely free options that work, the traps in "free hosting" offers, and when a cheap paid plan is the better deal.
“Free hosting” searches spike in Nepal for a simple reason: the .com.np domain is free, so the instinct is that the rest of the stack can be too. Sometimes it can — but the word “free” covers three very different offers, and two of them cost you something. Here is the honest map.
Genuinely free, genuinely useful
WordPress.com free tier. A real blog on a real managed platform — with WordPress.com branding, no plugins on the free tier, and no custom-domain email. Right for: students, portfolio experiments, testing whether you’ll actually write. When it sticks, upgrade or move to self-hosted WordPress — the WordPress hosting guide covers both.
GitHub Pages / Netlify / Vercel free tiers. For static sites — HTML, or a static site generator — these are professional-grade and free, and many developer portfolios live on them. The catch is that you are the CMS: no admin panel, no plugins, no PHP. Right for: developers, documentation, landing pages built by someone technical.
The free .com.np domain. Not hosting, but the other half of the free stack — see our step-by-step registration guide with the cover-letter template.
The “free hosting” offers that aren’t
Local providers advertise free hosting as an acquisition funnel. The pattern to read carefully:
- Ads or branding on your site — you’re the billboard
- Resource ceilings — “unlimited” plans with CPU caps that suspend your site exactly when it gets traffic
- No domain email — the thing that makes
you@yourbusiness.comwork - Migration friction — free tiers are engineered so that leaving is more work than paying
None of this is a scam; it’s a business model. But a business website is the wrong place to discover the ceilings.
The honest math
The reason “free” persists as a question is that people assume paid hosting is expensive. In our October 2026 snapshots, entry shared hosting ran $2.49/mo first term (Hostinger, 48-month term) — roughly the price of one bus fare across Kathmandu per month. The full year-one budget is in our hosting cost guide.
So the recommendation we give every Nepali business:
- Learning or experimenting → use the genuinely free tiers above; they’re excellent.
- A real business site → a cheap paid plan, the free .com.np or a .com domain, and Let’s Encrypt SSL. Total: less than a dinner out per month.
- Developer-built static site → GitHub Pages or Netlify free tier, legitimately, forever.
A note from this domain’s history
The podamibe.net era ran on the hosting that was available in 2015 — and the “free hosting with ads” sites of that era are almost all gone now, while the businesses that paid NPR 2,000 a year for modest shared hosting often still exist. The lesson hasn’t changed: free is for finding out what you want to build. Paying a little is for keeping it.
FAQ
Is free hosting good enough for a business website?
For a permanent business presence, no — free tiers carry ads-or-branding, resource limits, no email on your domain, and no support SLA. Free is right for learning, portfolios, and proving an idea; the moment real customers visit, a paid plan from our hosting shortlist costs less than a taxi ride per month.
What is genuinely free in 2026?
WordPress.com's free tier for simple blogs, GitHub Pages for static sites, Netlify/Vercel free tiers for static and jamstack projects — and the free .com.np domain from the registry. All are real, with real limits.
Why do local hosts give away "free hosting"?
Free tiers are marketing: they monetise on upgrades, ads, or upsells. Nothing wrong with that — just read what the free tier excludes before building on it.