Where to host a side project in 2026
A ranking for people shipping at night: static sites that should stay free, WordPress that should stay simple, and APIs that should not live on shared hosting.
A side project has a different failure mode than a company website. You will under-maintain it. The host has to survive neglect, a day job, and the moment traffic shows up because a post landed on the wrong subreddit.
If the project is static — Astro, Next export, a marketing page — you may not need anyone on this ranking. Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages will serve it for free at a quality that shared hosting will not match. This list starts to matter when you need a process, a database, WordPress, or a long-running worker.
For WordPress or a PHP app you do not want to babysit, Hostinger is still the least drama. You will not learn Linux. You will get SSL and a panel. That is the correct trade for a newsletter landing page or a content site you update on Sundays.
For an API, a bot, a webhook receiver, or anything with cron and background jobs, skip shared hosting. Hetzner is the default if you are comfortable installing Caddy and Docker Compose: more RAM, more traffic, boring invoices. DigitalOcean is the default if you want a managed Postgres next to the droplet and you would rather copy a tutorial than invent a backup story.
Cloudways is rarely the first host for a side project because the meter starts higher. It becomes reasonable the day the side project has customers and you would rather pay than SSH on a Saturday. Do not buy it as a motivational expense before there is revenue.
Namecheap belongs in this conversation as a registrar, not as the forever home of an app. Register the domain there if the price is good, then point it at Cloudflare and whatever actually runs the code.
Minimum-budget rule: static on a free platform, WordPress on Hostinger, always-on compute on Hetzner. Everything else is a convenience tax. Pay it when your time is worth more than the delta — which, for a night project, is later than you think.