Introduction

This is my third portfolio website. Why did I choose to make a third one?

The previous website was getting too cluttered, and did not feel very professional. It was becoming more of a personal website instead of a professional portfolio.

The one before that was too amateurish, reflecting my skill in web development at the time.

What do I want to do with this website? I just hope it makes my skills shine bright.

Now for something actually useful:

Hosting a Portfolio Website

There are many options when it comes to website hosting, whether it be a static website, a dynamic website, or even an interactive 3D one. The below options are listed in order of ease of use, kinda.

GitHub Pages

If I were a fresh graduate thinking about where to start with when making my own portfolio website, I'd start with GitHub pages.

GitHub pages provides a straightforward way to host a personal, static website, and it's completely free! Check it out here.

This is especially suitable for someone who doesn't know, or doesn't want to learn how to use one of the millions of javascript frameworks out there. It's a great starting point to work on web development fundamentals as well.

Vercel

This is the platform that this very website is hosted on. It's free (for now), has a ton of templates to choose from, and you can choose whatever flavour of javascript framework you like.

Vercel is catered towards Next.js users in particular, so there's that.

Vercel even has built-in analytics, command line tools, and a handy dashboard for managing all your other web projects that are hosted on Vercel. Very nice.

Start here.

AWS/GCP/Azure/Etc.

If you like to do everything yourself, or you just want to gain some cloud experience, then feel free to use one of the many cloud providers out there.

Most cloud providers have some sort of free tier for hosting, though I wouldn't count on it. But, it should be no issue if you're hosting a simple portfolio website.

Pick a cloud provider, then choose from the many many products that they have. You can spin up a virtual machine, run a docker container, go overkill with kubernetes, or just use one of their app solutions, etc.

Unfortunately, most of these cost money, and can have quite a learning curve, or need otherwise need some effort on your part to setup. Would be pretty good for the portfolio though.

Here's one you might not have heard of: DigitalOcean

It's cheaper (generally) than the other big cloud providers, and pretty easy to use.

I want a cooler portfolio

Normal website too boring for you? Try learning Three.js, or Babylon.js, or Unity, or webgpu (if you're into that). Using these, you can make your entire website 3D and interactive, you could even make an entire game or simulation with these.

This would be especially useful if you're looking to brand yourself as a VR/AR developer.

Technically, you can do similar fancy 3D stuff with just CSS, but that's an entirely different thing.