Weekend projects and free hosting stacks go hand in hand. Its a hard sell to sign up for recurrent fees to power hacks and “experiments”. This is a list of combinations that I like.

Highly Cachable Database Driven Sites

Heroku + Mongo HQ : Databases on Heroku can be expensive. You can get around this using plugins and being flexable with your backend choices. The two best options I found are Mongo HQ which will give you 1/2 a Gig of storage. The limitation on this storage is that it isn’t as fast as the paid instances but this works well for sites that cache everything or generate static data based on backend data.

Blog

Octopress + Heroku: Generated sites like Octopress are a great fit for Heroku since they don’t rely on a database. There is a great project template for this combo here.

Github Pages : Static sites, markdown pages or static pages generated by Jekkyl are really easy and a great fit.

General Purpose

App Engine: App Engine can be a great choice for new projects/startups since you can start for free and the costs for scaling are pretty good. The downside of App Engine is that it tends to lock you into the platform.

CDN and DDOS Prevention

CloudFlare: is great. It optomizes your pages(if you haven’t already), adds security against DDOS attacks and adds caching.

If you know one I missed let me know.