Static hosting is free because serving a file costs almost nothing. The hosts below all give away the small case to sell the large one, and a five-page brochure site is about as small as the small case gets.
What follows is what each one limits, not what each one advertises. The limit is the only part that will ever affect you.
Cloudflare Pages
Requests to static assets are unmetered on every plan, free included. That single fact removes the only failure mode that actually worries a small business: waking up to a bill, or to a dead site, because a post did unexpectedly well.
What it does limit is builds — 500 a month on the free plan, one at a time. If you have no build step, as I am arguing you should not, that limit is close to meaningless. You can also drag a folder into the dashboard and skip the repository entirely. The other caps are 20,000 files per site and 25 MiB per file, neither of which a brochure site will notice.
You get control over redirects and response headers through two plain text files in the project root, which matters more than it sounds: it is how you set a caching policy, add security headers, and keep old URLs working after a rebuild without a plugin.
This site runs on it.
Netlify
The one that made this category mainstream, and still the friendliest to set up. It is also the one whose free plan has changed most, so read this part carefully rather than trusting older write-ups.
Netlify now bills the free plan in credits: 300 a month, drawn down by bandwidth, compute and requests together. Deploys, traffic and form submissions all come out of the same pot.
What matters is what happens when the pot is empty. On the free plan the site is paused — visitors get a "Site not available" page, forms stop accepting submissions, and you cannot deploy — until the next billing cycle or until you upgrade. You cannot buy more credits on the free plan. Netlify presents this as a feature, and in fairness it is one: you will never get a surprise invoice. It is simply a different surprise.
For a five-page brochure with modest traffic, 300 credits is likely to be enough. "Likely" is doing real work in that sentence, and a small business finding its site replaced by an error page for the rest of the month is precisely the sort of thing this blog exists to help you avoid. That is the reason I default elsewhere.
Form handling is built in, which pairs neatly with the contact form post — just note that submissions draw on the same credits.
GitHub Pages
Free, stable, and it has outlived several of its competitors. If your site is already in a public GitHub repository, this is one settings toggle away. The limits are generous and soft: 1 GB per site, 100 GB of bandwidth a month, 10 builds an hour.
Two real constraints. Serving a site from a private repository needs GitHub Pro or Team — on the free plan, Pages works from public repositories only. That catches people out, because a small business is often not keen on its site's source being public, even though the source is only ever HTML that anyone visiting can already read. (Worth separating two things here: a paid plan lets you publish from a private repo, but the published site is still public either way. Genuinely private Pages sites are an Enterprise feature.)
The second constraint is that you have no control over response headers or server-side redirects. No custom caching policy, no security headers, and if a URL changes your options are a client-side redirect or a broken link.
It is the right answer for a personal site or a project page. It is a slightly awkward answer for a business.
Vercel
Technically excellent and the fastest of the four to get a preview URL out of. There is one thing to know before you put a business on it: the free Hobby plan is for non-commercial use.
Their fair use guidelines define commercial usage as any deployment used for the financial gain of anyone involved in any part of the project — and the listed examples include advertising the sale of a product or service, and receiving payment to create or host the site. Read that twice. A plumber's site is advertising a service, so it is commercial. And if you paid someone to build it, that alone makes it commercial, even if the site never asks anyone for money. Donations count too.
This is not a trap — it is written plainly in their terms, and it is easy to miss because nothing stops you deploying. On the paid plan Vercel is a good host. On the free plan, for a business site, it is the wrong tool.
Read what the free tier forbids, not what it includes.
What you are actually giving up
| Aspect | $18/mo managed WP | Free static host |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $216 a year | $0 |
| TLS certificate | Included, sometimes extra | Included, automatic |
| Traffic spike | Slows down or falls over | Served from cache |
| Server updates | Yours, or your care plan's | Not yours |
| Someone to phone | Yes, that is the $18 | No. This is the trade. |
The last row is the honest one. Free hosting comes with no support contract and no phone number. What you get instead is a site simple enough that there is very little to phone about — and if the host ever does something you dislike, moving is copying a folder somewhere else and changing a DNS record.
That is worth saying plainly, because it is the real argument. It is not that free hosting is better than paid hosting. It is that a folder of files is portable in a way a database-backed application is not, so the host stops being a decision you are locked into.
How to actually do it
- Put the files somewhere. A Git repository if you are comfortable with one; otherwise drag the folder into the host's dashboard.
- Point the domain. Two DNS records at your registrar. The host's docs give you the exact values.
- Wait for the certificate. Usually minutes, occasionally an hour. You do not have to do anything.
- Check it on your phone, then leave it alone.
Keep the domain registration separate from the hosting. It is the one thing you genuinely own, it costs about fifteen dollars a year, and having it at a different company to everything else means no single account being lost takes the whole thing down.
Hosting cost for a five-page site on any of the four.
Free tiers, no card required
Domain registration, per year, and the only bill left.
Typical .com renewal, 2026
DNS records between you and a live site.
Per host documentation
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