Best static site hosting in 2026: free and paid options compared

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A static site serves pre-built files, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images, directly, without running server code for every visitor. That makes it fast, cheap to host, and a good fit for most marketing sites, blogs, documentation and portfolios. Here are five real hosting options, each fact-checked against the vendor's own current pricing pages as of October 2026.

The options

Netlify

Netlify, one of the most widely used platforms for deploying static sites and modern frameworks, runs on a credit-based pricing model: Free at $0 a month (300 credits), Personal at $9 (1,000 credits), and Pro at $20 a month (3,000 credits, unlimited team members). Credits cover builds, bandwidth and compute at metered rates, and Netlify adds real extras beyond plain static hosting: built-in Forms (free and unlimited on credit-based plans) and Identity for basic login, both covered in more detail in my Netlify Forms guide.

• Best for: A static site that also needs a working contact form or basic login without adding a separate service.

Vercel

Vercel, built by the team behind the Next.js framework, offers a free Hobby plan with 1 million CDN requests and 100GB of data transfer a month, and a Pro plan at $20 a month per developer seat with 10 million requests and 1TB of transfer included.

• Best for: A static site built with Next.js specifically, where Vercel's first-party framework support has the fewest rough edges.

Cloudflare Workers / Pages

Cloudflare's developer platform (its static-site-focused Pages product now sits under its broader Workers platform) gives a free tier of 100,000 requests a day with zero charge for bandwidth or data transfer at any tier, and a Paid plan starting at $5 a month with 10 million requests included.

• Best for: A high-traffic static site where you specifically want to never be billed for a traffic spike, since Cloudflare's pricing model doesn't meter data transfer at all.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages, a free static hosting feature built directly into GitHub, has no paid tier, just documented soft limits: a recommended 1GB source repository size, a 1GB maximum published site size, a soft 100GB monthly bandwidth limit, and a soft cap of 10 builds an hour (liftable with a custom GitHub Actions workflow). It supports custom domains at no extra cost.

• Best for: A simple, low-traffic static site, especially one already living in a GitHub repository for other reasons.

Render

Render, a hosting platform spanning static sites and full backend services, advertises free static site hosting with automatic deploys on every Git push and a free onrender.com subdomain. Its documented differentiator by plan is custom domain allowances: Hobby includes 2 custom domains, Pro 15, and Scale 25, with additional domains costing $0.25 a month each. Render's specific workspace-plan monthly prices beyond the free static-site tier weren't retrievable from the pages I could access directly during this research, so confirm current workspace pricing on render.com/pricing before committing to a paid tier.

• Best for: A static site that might later need a companion backend service, since Render hosts both under one account.

Custom domains and SSL, across all five

One piece of good news that applies evenly across every platform here: custom domain support with free, automatic SSL (the padlock and https:// in a visitor's browser) is standard on all five, including every free tier. This wasn't always true across the hosting industry, free SSL used to be a paid add-on on many older hosts, so it's worth knowing you don't need to budget separately for it on any of these, regardless of which one you pick or which tier you're on.

Side by side

Platform	Free tier	Entry paid tier	Bandwidth charged?
Netlify	$0, 300 credits/mo	$9/mo (Personal), $20/mo (Pro, team)	Yes, metered via credits
Vercel	$0, 100GB transfer/mo	$20/mo per seat (Pro)	Yes, beyond included amount
Cloudflare	$0, 100k requests/day	$5/mo (Paid)	Never, at any tier
GitHub Pages	$0, soft 100GB/mo limit	No paid tier exists	No charge, soft limit only
Render	$0, free static hosting	Confirm directly on render.com	Counted against workspace allocation

Deploy workflow and build experience

Price and bandwidth aren't the only things that differ between these five. The day-to-day experience of actually shipping changes varies too, and it's worth weighing alongside the numbers.

• Deploy previews. Netlify and Vercel both generate a preview link for every pull request automatically, letting you (or a client) see a change live before it reaches the real site. GitHub Pages has no native equivalent, since it typically deploys straight from a branch. Render supports preview environments on paid workspace tiers. If Netlify does not suit you, see Netlify alternatives.
• Rollbacks. Netlify's immutable deploys mean every past deploy stays available to instantly roll back to if something breaks, confirmed in its own documentation. Vercel works similarly through its deployment history. GitHub Pages has no dedicated one-click rollback; reverting means reverting the underlying Git commit and redeploying.
• Build configuration. Netlify and Vercel both auto-detect most common frameworks and set sensible defaults. GitHub Pages, by contrast, is simplest for plain static files or Jekyll (which it supports natively); anything else typically needs a custom GitHub Actions workflow to build before publishing.
• Edge network coverage. All five run on a global CDN, so raw page-load speed differences between them are small for most small business traffic levels; the differences that matter in practice are usually about included quotas and extra features, not raw speed.

A worked example: a small business blog choosing between them

Say you're launching a blog for a local business, built as a static site, expecting a few thousand visits a month to start, with an occasional image-heavy post. On Netlify's free tier, that traffic level comfortably fits inside 300 monthly credits for most blogs this size. On Vercel's Hobby plan, it sits well inside the 100GB transfer allowance. On Cloudflare, it's nowhere near the 100,000-requests-a-day free ceiling. On GitHub Pages, it's comfortably under the soft 100GB bandwidth limit, assuming the site stays under the 1GB size cap. In other words, at this traffic level, cost genuinely isn't the deciding factor between any of the five, since all of them handle it for free. The decision comes down to what else you want: a built-in contact form (Netlify), tightest Next.js integration (Vercel), zero bandwidth billing ever (Cloudflare), or the simplest possible setup if you're already living in GitHub day to day (GitHub Pages).

How to pick

• Want forms or login built in without adding another service? Netlify.
• Building specifically with Next.js? Vercel.
• Expecting genuinely high or unpredictable traffic and want bandwidth off the table as a cost? Cloudflare.
• Just need a simple project page or portfolio and you're already on GitHub? GitHub Pages.
• Might need a backend service alongside your static site eventually? Render.

How I'd approach this

For most small business static sites I build, Netlify is my default: the free and entry-paid tiers are genuinely generous for a typical brochure or marketing site, and having Forms and basic login available without a separate service saves real setup time. I'll reach for Vercel specifically for a Next.js project, or Cloudflare when a client's traffic is high enough that avoiding bandwidth charges meaningfully changes the economics. None of these five are a wrong choice technically; the real decision is usually about which extras you need bundled in versus which you're happy to add separately.