Best free website hosting for a small business: real limits, real traps

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A free tier can mean a real, permanently free plan with genuine limits, or a time-limited trial dressed up as "free." The options below are the former: plans you can run a small business site on indefinitely at $0, confirmed against each vendor's own current pricing as of October 2026.

Free options and their real limits

Netlify (free, $0/month, 300 credits)

Netlify, a platform for hosting sites built as actual code (static sites or frameworks like Next.js and Astro), gives its Free plan 300 usage credits a month, covering builds, bandwidth and compute at metered rates (roughly $0.10 per production deploy, $0.07 per GB-hour of compute, $0.13 per GB of bandwidth). It also includes unlimited deploy previews, custom domains with free SSL, and free, unlimited Netlify Forms submissions. For a low-traffic brochure site with occasional updates, 300 credits typically covers a real month of usage comfortably.

• Best for: A code-based site (built by a developer or an AI coding tool) with light to moderate traffic, especially one that also wants a working contact form built in.

Vercel (free Hobby plan, $0/month)

Vercel's Hobby plan, aimed at personal and small projects, includes 1 million CDN requests a month, 100GB of data transfer, 1 million ISR reads, and 4 hours of function compute time. It's genuinely generous for a small site, but it's licensed for personal and non-commercial use under Vercel's own terms, worth checking directly if your site is explicitly for a registered business rather than a personal project. For apps built with AI tools, see where to host an AI-built app.

• Best for: A Next.js-based project, especially one you're still validating before deciding whether to pay for a team plan.

Cloudflare Workers / Pages (free tier, $0/month)

Cloudflare's free developer platform tier includes 100,000 requests a day with no charge at all for bandwidth or data transfer, a genuinely unusual feature since most hosts meter bandwidth even on free plans. The trade-off is a lower request ceiling than some competitors and a slightly more technical setup process than a drag-and-drop builder.

• Best for: A static site where you specifically want to avoid ever being billed for traffic spikes, since Cloudflare's model never charges for data transfer regardless of tier.

GitHub Pages (free, no paid tier)

GitHub Pages, a free static site host built into GitHub itself, has no paid tier at all, just documented soft limits: a recommended 1GB repository size, a 1GB maximum published site size, a soft 100GB-a-month bandwidth limit, and a soft limit of 10 builds an hour (removable with a custom GitHub Actions workflow). It supports custom domains. Paid options sit alongside it in static site hosting compared.

• Best for: A very simple static site, a portfolio, a project page, or documentation, where you're already comfortable with GitHub and don't need forms, server code, or heavy traffic.

Wegic (AI website builder, free tier unconfirmed)

Wegic, an AI tool that builds and hosts a website for you through a chat conversation rather than code or a drag-and-drop editor, advertises a free way to start building, but I couldn't confirm the specific limits of its free tier through the pages I could access directly during this research. Check Wegic's current promotional pricing and its own pricing page directly before assuming what's included at no cost.

• Best for: Someone who wants to try building a site by describing it in plain language before committing to a paid plan, once you've confirmed what the free tier actually includes.

Free tier vs. free trial, know the difference

Several platforms worth knowing about aren't on the list above specifically because their "free" is time-limited rather than a permanent plan, and conflating the two is a common budgeting mistake. Squarespace's 14-day free trial, for instance, lets you build and preview a site but requires a paid plan to actually publish it live. That's a genuinely different product than a permanently free tier like Netlify's or GitHub Pages', even though both get described casually as "free hosting" in search results. Before you build anything substantial on a "free" plan, confirm directly whether it's free indefinitely or free only for an evaluation period, since discovering the difference after you've written a dozen pages of content is a frustrating way to find out.

The real traps with "free" hosting

• A subdomain instead of your own domain. Many free builder plans publish your site at something like yourbusiness.wixsite.com or similar rather than your own domain, which looks unprofessional and is worth checking before you build anything you're emotionally attached to.
• The platform's own branding on your site. Free tiers on some builders display an ad or badge for the platform itself, something you'd only remove by upgrading.
• Features gated behind a paid plan that you don't notice are missing until you actually need them: a contact form, basic analytics, or e-commerce, for instance.
• Personal-use licensing on code-hosting free tiers. Vercel's Hobby plan, for example, is intended for personal projects; running an actual registered business on it without checking the terms is worth confirming directly rather than assuming it's fine indefinitely.
• Soft limits that aren't guaranteed. GitHub Pages' bandwidth and build limits are documented as "soft," meaning GitHub monitors and can act on sites that exceed them regularly, not a hard wall you'll never hit but also not a number you can build a business around blindly.

A worked example: a one-page business launch site

Say you're launching a single-page site announcing a new local business, no blog, no store, just a description, photos and a contact form, expecting a few hundred visits a month while word spreads. This is close to the ideal use case for free hosting: Netlify's free tier covers a site this light with room to spare, its Forms feature handles the contact form at no extra cost, and the free SSL and custom domain support mean the site looks fully professional despite costing nothing to run. The only genuine cost here is the domain name itself, typically $10 to $20 a year regardless of which host you choose. This is the scenario where paying for hosting before you need to would be actively wasteful, not just unnecessary caution.

Signs it's time to upgrade from free

• Your traffic is approaching a documented limit (GitHub Pages' 100GB soft bandwidth cap, Netlify's 300 monthly credits, Vercel's included request count), rather than comfortably under it. If Netlify's limits bite, look at Netlify alternatives.
• You need a feature that's gated on a paid tier, whether that's a custom domain without a subdomain, removing platform branding, or a feature like e-commerce or advanced forms.
• Your site is now making the business real revenue, at which point a $9 to $20 a month hosting cost is a rounding error against what downtime or a degraded experience would actually cost you. Typical paid costs are shown in what it costs to host a website.
• You're running the site for an actual registered business on a platform whose free tier terms are written for personal or non-commercial use, which is worth resolving before it becomes a problem rather than after.

How I'd approach this

Free hosting is genuinely fine for a new small business site, and I'd never tell someone to pay before they need to. Where I'd push back is on choosing a free plan specifically because it's free without checking what's actually included, then discovering mid-launch that your domain isn't your own, or a feature you assumed was standard sits behind a paywall. Read the actual limits of whichever free tier you pick before you build around it, and plan for the day you'll outgrow it rather than being surprised by it.