I am learning the basics of web dev to so that I can manage my e-business independently . While going through a few firebase tutorials I was wondering if it would be ideal to host my site on firebase (free tier) rather than purchase seperate hosting from godaddy and only pay for the domain name. its just a basic shopping site running on codeigniter .
For starters, is for PHP and Firebase only supports front-end hosting, with its own backend as an API.
So you would probably need to re-implement your entire application.
Firebase is good when starting out, but has a number of disadvantages that you must consider.
- It’s harder to architecture, the app, due to the limitations of Firebase you will need to “developer around” A great example is optimizing your database design to limit the number of “reads” your making in Firebase.
- It’s pay as you go, and it’s very easy to pay if things “explode”.
- You have vendor lock-in. You can’t change the hosting, or the back-end implementation, or database implementation.
If your just starting out I suggest looking into how you build your own “e-business” with best practices. Don’t use Firebase just because of its free tier, due to it’s limitations, unless your architecture really could use its features. (Auth, security, real-time database)
Continue learning web development, and look more into architecture. What you don’t want is to learn X and find out its the totally wrong approach for what you want to build. (an e commerce site)
Goodluck 
PS. Firebase is great for quick hosting for front-end projects with basic backend data, that don’t plan on having high usages. It’s data-base api and handling is really complex (Observable based) and hard to learn by itself, compared to the average REST endpoints setups most people use/learn.
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Interesting points you’ve made. I’ve looked at firebase recently and was thinkin of using the free tier as a prototype tool.
In your opinion once you’ve started with firebase is best to continue