Best Free Hosting for a Static Site (2026)

For a static site, the best free hosting is Cloudflare Pages, with GitHub Pages the simplest option and Netlify and Vercel close behind. This is the one corner of hosting where free genuinely beats paid: a static site served from a global network with a free custom domain and HTTPS is faster and more reliable than most budget shared hosting, and it costs nothing. If your site is static, you should almost never pay to host it. Here is how the free static hosts compare and how to choose.

What counts as a static site

A static site is one made of pre-built files — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images — that the server hands over as-is, with no database and no server-side code generating pages on each request. That covers far more than plain HTML: portfolios, documentation, blogs built with a static-site generator, marketing sites, and anything exported by a modern framework all qualify. If your site does not need to run PHP or query a database on the server, it is static, and the free static hosts are built for exactly it. If it needs a live database — a forum, a classic WordPress install, a store — it is not static, and you need a different kind of host.

The best free static hosts, briefly

Four free hosts lead the field, and each suits a different person. Cloudflare Pages is the strongest all-rounder because it gives unlimited bandwidth and unlimited sites, so a traffic spike never costs you. GitHub Pages is the simplest if your code already lives on GitHub, deploying straight from a repository. Netlify is the most polished for build features like forms and previews, capped at 100 GB of bandwidth a month. Vercel is superb for framework-built sites, with one catch worth repeating: its free Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use only. Our detailed GitHub vs Cloudflare vs Netlify Pages comparison pits them head to head on the numbers.

How to choose between them

Choose on three questions. First, how much traffic might you get? If a spike is possible, Cloudflare Pages and its unlimited bandwidth remove the only real risk, where Netlify's 100 GB cap and pricey overage could bite. Second, is the site commercial? If it makes money or represents a business, avoid Vercel's Hobby plan, whose terms forbid commercial use, and lean toward Cloudflare or GitHub Pages. Third, how do you want to deploy? If you already use Git, GitHub Pages or Cloudflare's Git integration is frictionless; if you want to drag a folder into a dashboard, Netlify makes that easy. For most people most of the time, Cloudflare Pages is the safe default.

How to put a static site online for free

The process is short on any of these hosts. Build your site into a folder of static files. Push it to a Git repository, or drag the folder into the host's dashboard. Connect the host to that source, and it deploys automatically on every change. Add your own domain in the host's settings — all four support a free custom domain — and it issues a free SSL certificate so the site loads over HTTPS within minutes. From then on, updating the site is a matter of pushing new files; there is no server to patch and no bill to pay.

One caveat keeps you safe: a static free host will not grow into a store or a database-driven app. If your plans include either, read where free hosting stops in our honest free web hosting guide before you build, so the free host you choose is one you will not immediately outgrow.

What a static host can't do

A free static host cannot run server-side code or a database, and that boundary is the one thing to be sure of before you commit. There is no PHP, no MySQL, no cPanel, so a classic WordPress install, a forum or a shopping cart will not run on any of them. Anything that needs to save data on the server, process a payment, or generate pages on the fly is out of scope. The modern workaround is serverless functions plus a hosted API or database, which Cloudflare, Netlify and Vercel all support on their free tiers — but that is a developer's path, not a point-and-click one. If your site is content that rarely changes, a static host is perfect; if it is an application that stores and processes data, you need a different kind of hosting.

The one common feature that trips people up is contact forms. A static site cannot process a form submission by itself, because there is no server code to receive it. Netlify solves this with built-in free form handling up to a monthly limit; on the others you use a third-party form service or a serverless function. It is a small thing, but it is the feature people most often assume will just work and then find does not — so plan for it if your site needs to collect messages.

How to build a static site to host

If you do not already have a static site, a static-site generator is the usual way to make one, and all of them deploy cleanly to these free hosts. Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, Jekyll and the export mode of frameworks like Next and SvelteKit each turn content into the folder of static files these hosts serve. Jekyll pairs natively with GitHub Pages; the rest deploy to Cloudflare, Netlify or Vercel by connecting your repository and letting the host run the build. For a simple site you can also just write plain HTML and CSS by hand — there is no requirement to use a generator at all, and a hand-built page is the lightest thing a static host can serve. Whichever route you take, the output is the same kind of static files, and the free hosting for them is genuinely free.