Best tools for launching your website

Your website needs a home, preferably somewhere in the cloud.
Check what options you have for different amount of monthly fee (starting from the free option).
Learn more on why hosting in the cloud is a good solution or what parameters are important.

Display price:

Per hour Per month

Amazon Free Tier
1 GB RAM
1 CPU
30 GB of SSD storage
750 hours of t2.micro with Linux
AND
750 hours of t2.micro with Windows
Linux and Windows hosting

Heroku
512 MB (1 dyno)
1 CPU
5 MB for DB (~10 000 rows)
1000 dyno hours per month (running one website non-stop takes ~750 dyno hours per month)

Linode
1 GB RAM
1 CPU
20 GB of SSD storage
1 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open Linode

DigitalOcean
512 MB RAM
1 CPU
20 GB of SSD storage
1 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open DigitalOcean

Amazon Lightsail
512 MB RAM
1 CPU
20 GB of SSD storage
1 TB of transfer
No IPv6 support
Open Amazon Lightsail

Linode
2 GB RAM
1 CPU
30 GB of SSD storage
2 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open Linode

DigitalOcean
1 GB RAM
1 CPU
30 GB of SSD storage
2 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open DigitalOcean

Amazon Lightsail
1 GB RAM
1 CPU
30 GB of SSD storage
2 TB of transfer
No IPv6 support
Open Amazon Lightsail

Linode
4 GB RAM
2 CPU
48 GB of SSD storage
3 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open Linode

DigitalOcean
2 GB RAM
2 CPU
40 GB of SSD storage
3 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open DigitalOcean

Amazon Lightsail
2 GB RAM
2 CPU
40 GB of SSD storage
3 TB of transfer
No IPv6 support
Open Amazon Lightsail

Linode
8 GB RAM
4 CPU
96 GB of SSD storage
4 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open Linode

DigitalOcean
4 GB RAM
2 CPU
60 GB of SSD storage
4 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open DigitalOcean

Amazon Lightsail
4 GB RAM
2 CPU
60 GB of SSD storage
4 TB of transfer
No IPv6 support
Open Amazon Lightsail

Linode
12 GB RAM
6 CPU
192 GB of SSD storage
8 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open Linode

DigitalOcean
8 GB RAM
4 CPU
80 GB of SSD storage
5 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open DigitalOcean

Amazon Lightsail
8 GB RAM
2 CPU
80 GB of SSD storage
5 TB of transfer
No IPv6 support
Open Amazon Lightsail

Linode
48 GB RAM
12 CPU
768 GB of SSD storage
20 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open Linode

DigitalOcean
32 GB RAM
12 CPU
320 GB of SSD storage
7 TB of transfer
IPv6 support
Open DigitalOcean

Amazon
m4.2xlarge
32 GB RAM
8 CPU
No storage
(from $0.1/GB-month on EBS)
Open Amazon

Your website needs a URL, so people can visit it.
Check how much different domains cost per year (the common ones like .com but also the unusual ones like .pizza).
Learn about what happens if you don't have a domain or the difference between domain providers.

Namecheap
$10.69 for .com
$12.48 for .org
$32.88 for .io
$39.88 for .pizza
Open Namecheap

Namesilo
$8.99 for .com
$10.79 for .org
No .io domain
$12.99 for .pizza
Open namesilo

1&1
$14.99 ($0.99 first year) for .com
$16.99 ($2.99 first year) for .org
$49 ($34.99 first year) for .io
$99 ($39.99 first year) for .pizza
Open 1&1

For a long time, the only way to get an SSL (or TLS) certificate was to pay $30 or more per year. Fortunately, since December 2015, the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) sponsored by many companies created the Let's Encrypt project and now everyone can get SSL certificates for free. Go to the Let's Encrypt website and check how to install the certificate (they have instructions for different operating systems and web servers) or if you are using Ubuntu, check the more detailed, step-by-step tutorials from DigitalOcean (for Apache or Nginx).

Open Let's Encrypt

You don't need to worry if your website is still working when you sleep.
There are automatic tools that will check it and notify you when something is wrong (your website is down or has errors).
Check out the best free uptime monitors.

Uptime Robot
5 minutes check rate
50 monitors
1 location
Content matching
Shows average response time
Integration with email, webhooks, Twitter, Hipchat, Pushbullet, Pushover, Slack, Boxcar 2
Free email-to-SMS
(optional) $15 for 50 SMS
Open Uptime Robot

StatusCake
5 minutes check rate
Unlimited monitors
1 random location
No content matching
Shows average response time
Integration with email, webhooks, Twitter, Hipchat, Pushbullet, Pushover, Slack, PagerDuty, VictorOps, OpsGenie
No email-to-SMS
(optional) $15 for 50 SMS
Open StatusCake

Web analytics tools allow to see how users are interacting with your website. Starting from which browser or device is the most popular, what age are your visitors or how did they find your website, up to the heat maps showing what users clicked or how they moved the mouse.
For most cases I would recommend using the Google Analytics - it's free but packed with features. If you are concerned about the privacy, you can use Piwik - an open source tool, that you can host yourself. Finally, if you have a marketing team that needs more specific reports, there are many advanced, paid solutions (no recommendation here, as everything depends on your specific use case).

When you ask about files storage, most people will recommend Amazon S3 and there are many good reasons for that. Not only it's one of the cheapest solutions, but it comes with additional benefits. For example, if you are using other parts of the AWS stack, transferring files between S3 and other services in the same region will usually be free (and fast, as all the traffic happens in the same data center). Also, thanks to it's huge popularity, there are plenty of libraries that will help you integrate S3 with basically any other piece of software. Apart from the standard S3 storage, AWS offers two other storage types, for files that you won't access so frequently: Infrequent Access Storage and Glacier Storage.

Amazon S3
Storage prices in $ per GB per month
Standard Storage 0.021 - 0.026 $
Infrequent Access Storage 0.0125 - 0.026 $
Glacier Storage 0.007 - 0.012 $
Transfering data out 0.05 - 0.25 $/GB
First GB per month is free
Free transfer to EC2 (in the same region)
Check detailed prices
Open Amazon

When using a Content Delivery Network, all files for your website are distributed in many servers (Points of Presence or PoP) around the world.
Each time someone visits your website, the CDN will deliver the files from the closest location, making it load faster.
See some of the available CDN services below or read about other benefits of using a CDN.

CDN77
Transfer: 0.049 - 0.185 $/GB
Free storage (up to 50GB)
Points of presence: 32
Transfer discounts start from 30TB
Minimum recharge: $149
(valid for 1 year)

CloudFront
Transfer: 0.085 - 0.25 $/GB
Free storage
Transfer between data centers:
0.020 - 0.16 $/GB
10,000 HTTP requests:
0.0075 - 0.016 $
10,000 HTTPS requests:
0.01 - 0.022 $
Points of presence: 37

MaxCDN
100GB/month (2 PoP): $9
500GB/month (3 PoP): $39
1TB/month (5 PoP): $79
$15 per month to use PoP outside of US and Europe
$12 per year for each additional PoP

CloudFlare
Free package: 3 page rules
$20/month: 20 page rules
$200/month: 50 page rules
DDoS protection
(24/7/365 uptime in higher plans)

Not all the bugs are caught with tests, so it's important to know when users are seeing errors.
You can either sift through the logs or use tools for capturing and presenting exceptions in a more readable way.

Sentry
Free plan with:
10,000 events per month
1 user
Paid plans starting at $12/month:
50,000 events per month
Unlimited users
Pre-pay annually or pay on-demand
90 days data retention
Open source version
that you can host yourself

Rollbar
Free plan with:
5,000 events per month
30 days data retention
Paid plans starting at $49/month:
100,000 events per month
180 days data retention
Unlimited applications
Unlimited users

Airbrake
Free plan (1 user & 1 project)
Paid plans starting at $49/month
25 errors/minute
30 days data retention
30 days free trial
5 application monitored
5 team members

Sooner or later you realize that you need to communicate with users, for example by sending a newsletter from time to time.
Or, maybe you need to send emails automatically when user performs a specific action (using transactional emails).
Writing good emails is hard, but sending them for free (at least for a small audience) is not, thanks to the following companies.
Speaking of emails, don't forget to subscribe for DeployStack newsletter at the bottom of the page!

MailChimp
Free plan
12,000 emails per month
2,000 subscribers
Transactional emails through mandrill
(requires paid plan)

SendinBlue
Free plan
9,000 emails per month
(300 emails per day limit)
Unlimited subscribers
Also transactional emails (free)
Transactional SMS (paid)

SparkPost
100,000 free emails per month
10,000 emails per day limit
Attachments up to 25MB (free)
Open SparkPost

Amazon SES
62,000 free emails per month
Attachments: $0.12/GB
Fees for receiving emails
Open Amazon SES

Mailgun
10,000 free emails per month
Free incoming emails
Attachments up to 25MB (free)
Open Mailgun

Online code repositories allow you to share your code with other people and synchronize it between computers.
Most of them will let you create unlimited public repositories and some of them will also give you free private repositories.
Check the most popular options below.

GitLab
Free public repositiories
Free private repositiories
Free to host on your servers
Enterprise edition from $35/year
Comes with free continous
integration and deployment tools

GitHub
Free public repositiories
Private repositories: $7/month
Free private repositories for students
Host on your servers: $21/user/month

Bitbucket
Free public repositiories
Free private repositiories (5 users)
Above 5 users: $1/user/month
Free for academic accounts

With continuous integration and deployment, you can automatically run tests and other tasks each time you push code to a git repository.
And once the tests are passing, the new code can be automatically deployed to production.
Save yourself the hassle and test/deploy your websites automatically with one of those great tools.

CircleCI
1500 build minutes per month for free
(is that enough for me?)
Additional containers cost $50/month
Paid OS X plans to build in an Apple environment
4 Linux containers and OS X plan
for free for open source projects
Supports GitHub and Bitbucket

Codeship
100 builds/month for free
Paid plans starting from $49/month
Codeship Basic plan for
out-of-the-box workflow
Codeship Pro plan for fully customizable Docker boxes
Supports GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab

Travis CI
Free for open source (public) projects on GitHub
Only supports GitHub
Paid plans starting from $69/month
(first 100 builds are free)
Plans for students

Jenkins
Free and open source
Self-contained, easy to install Java program that you can host yourself
1000+ plugins
Cross-platform
Open Jenkins

GoCD
Free and open source
Paid support provided by ThoughtWorks
Multiple plugins
Cross-platform
Open GoCD

When you don't need a backend for your website, you can publish it as a static page.
It doesn't require a lot of computing resources and many companies will help you for free.
You can deploy websites straight from the command line or from a git repository.
If you anticipate adding more features (maybe a database?), check the advanced option.

GitLab pages
Free, static pages are hosted on GitLab
Separate websites for projects and organizations
Supports any static site generator
Free Continuous Integration
Slightly more complicated setup

GitHub pages
Free, static pages are hosted on GitHub
Separate websites for projects and organizations
Supports only Jekyll (to use other static site generators, you need to precompile files locally)
Easy, out-of-the-box setup

Surge
Free plan with unlimited websites, custom domains and basic SSL
Paid plan: $13/month/project
CLI and dashboard interface
Global CDN
Custom SSL (paid plan)
Custom redirects (paid plan)
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (paid plan)
Open Surge

Aerobatic
Free plan with unlimited websites, custom domains and basic SSL
Paid plan: $15/month
CLI and dashboard interface
Global CDN
Deploy stages
10 GB/day data transfer (for free)
or 500 GB/month (paid plan)
Custom domain (paid plan)
Open Aerobatic

Netlify
Free plan for simple websites
Paid plans starting from $9/month
($49/month plan is free for Open Souce)
CDN for faster websites rendering
Free SSL certificates
HTTP2 support
Unlimited snapshots for reverting changes easily
Continuous Integration with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket or your own repository
Supports multiple static site generators (Jekyll, Grunt, Middleman, Roots, Hugo) and front end build tools (Grunt, Gulp, Broccoli)

Firebase
Free plan (1GB storage, 10GB/month transfer)
Pay as you go and monthly plans available
CDN for faster websites rendering
Free SSL certificates
HTTP2 support
Requires manual deployment
Not only for static pages
(various tools and infrastructure for all kinds of websites and apps)
Functions - serverless backend (like Amazon Lambda)

Sometimes a simple hosting and a domain are not enough.
When you need a bunch of different tools, check out the cloud computing companies.
They may be more expensive, but having all tools in one place is easier (especially if your website grows bigger).

AWS
Free tier for the first 12 months
More features than competition
Longest time on market
(more 3rd party libraries,
better documentation)

Google Cloud
$300 free credits to spend during first 12-months
"Always Free" tier

Azure
30 days free trial (with $200 free credits)
Good support for Windows application

Cloud computing platforms are complex and hard to compare (they change the list of features and pricing often).
Based on a specific use case, you will have to pick the best option yourself. Check those articles if you need help choosing: Sitepoint, Hacker News, RightScale.

DeployStack

Hosting

Domain Name

SSL certificate

Monitoring

Web analytics

Files storage

CDN

Error tracking

Sending emails

Version Control

Continuous integration

Static websites

Cloud computing