Host Your College Project Online Free — 15 Minute Guide

A live URL transforms your project review AND your resume. "See it here" beats twenty slides — and it is free.

The free stack

• Frontend (HTML/CSS/JS/React): GitHub Pages or Vercel — push code, get URL, 5 minutes
• Backend (Node/Express/Flask): Render free tier — connects to your repo, auto-deploys on push
• Database: MongoDB Atlas free 512MB or Supabase (Postgres) — both free forever tiers

The 15-minute path (typical project)

1. Push frontend + backend to GitHub (two repos or one)
2. Vercel → Import repo → deploy (frontend live)
3. Render → New Web Service → repo → build npm install, start node index.js
4. Atlas → create cluster → paste connection string into Render's environment variables
5. Point frontend fetch URLs at the Render URL. Done

Gotchas that eat the 15 minutes

• Hardcoded localhost:3000 — use environment variables
• Render free tier sleeps after 15 min — first request takes ~30s (say so in your README)
• Secrets in code — move keys to env vars before pushing public

Full comparison: free hosting guide.