Free web hosting, ranked by what you actually get

Free web hosting is real, and in 2026 some of it is genuinely excellent — for the right kind of site. The trap is that "free" is a sticker price, not a description of the deal. A good free host trades you a subdomain, a resource cap, or a static-only stack in exchange for the money; a bad one trades your uptime, your data, or your site itself. This page ranks the free hosts we would actually recommend, tells you what each one takes in place of a bill, and marks the line where staying free costs you more than paying would.

One thing up front, because it is the whole reason this site exists: the free hosts we recommend pay us nothing. There is no affiliate commission on GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, InfinityFree or WordPress.com's free plan — several of them run no partner program at all. We are paid only if you later outgrow free and buy a cheap paid host through us. That means the ranking below has no money riding on it. If you want the safety angle first, read is free web hosting safe before you build anything.

What free web hosting actually is

Free web hosting is a provider running your website's files on their servers at no charge, in exchange for something other than money. In 2026 it splits into two families that barely resemble each other. The first is the modern static-site platform — GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel — which serves pre-built HTML, CSS and JavaScript from a global network, gives you a free custom domain and HTTPS, and is fast and reliable, but will not run a traditional database-driven site or a store. The second is the classic free host — InfinityFree is the surviving example — which hands you a cPanel-style account with PHP and MySQL, so it can run WordPress or a forum, but throttles you with hit limits, tiny file caps and no email.

Knowing which family you need is most of the decision. If your site is static — a portfolio, a landing page, documentation, a marketing site built by a modern framework — the static platforms are not a compromise; they are better than most cheap paid hosting. If your site needs server-side code and a database on a budget of zero, your realistic options shrink to InfinityFree and a lot of patience.

The legit free hosts, and who each is for

These six are the free hosts worth your time in 2026. None is a scam; each is the right answer for a specific person and the wrong answer for everyone else. We link none of them, because none of them pays us and none needs a tracking link to be recommended honestly.

Cloudflare Pages — the best free static host

Cloudflare Pages is the one we recommend most often, because it gives away the thing every other free host meters: bandwidth. It serves unlimited bandwidth and unlimited sites on the free plan, with a free custom domain, free SSL, and 500 builds a month — enough for almost any personal or small-business static site. The catch is that it is a static and serverless platform, not a traditional host: there is no cPanel, no MySQL, no PHP. If your site is built as static files, this is not a downgrade from paid hosting; it is an upgrade you happen not to pay for.

GitHub Pages — the simplest, if you already use Git

GitHub Pages hosts a static site straight from a repository, with a free custom domain and HTTPS, and it is the path of least resistance if your project already lives on GitHub. It carries soft limits — GitHub suggests sites stay under about 1 GB and 100 GB of bandwidth a month — and its terms are aimed at project, personal and documentation sites, not primarily commercial ones or online stores. For a developer's portfolio, a docs site or an open-source project page, nothing is simpler. For a business that needs to grow, its quiet commercial-use guidance is a reason to look at Cloudflare or a paid host instead.

Netlify (free) — great, until the bandwidth bill

Netlify's free tier is a polished static-and-serverless platform with a free custom domain, HTTPS, forms and functions. Its ceiling is 100 GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes a month, and the reason we rate it just below Cloudflare is the overage: exceed the free bandwidth and the cost jumps sharply, where Cloudflare simply keeps serving. For a low-traffic site it is superb; for anything that might get a spike of attention, know where the meter is before you rely on it.

Vercel (Hobby) — free, but personal use only

Vercel's Hobby plan is an outstanding free home for a static or framework-built personal site: 100 GB of data transfer a month, a free custom domain, SSL and instant global deploys. It has one catch that catches people out, so read it twice — the Hobby plan is licensed for personal, non-commercial use only. The moment your site charges a customer, runs ads for profit or represents a business, Vercel's terms require you to move to the Pro plan at 20 dollars per developer per month. For a hobby project it is free and brilliant; for a business it is a paid host wearing a free label.

InfinityFree — the only real free PHP/MySQL host left

If you need PHP and MySQL for free — to run WordPress, a small forum or a script that needs a database — InfinityFree is the surviving legitimate option, and it genuinely charges nothing and shows no ads. In return it caps you hard: 5 GB of disk, a limit of roughly 50,000 hits a day, 30,000 files (inodes), a 10 MB per-file ceiling, one FTP account and no email. Busy or resource-heavy sites get suspended, and uptime is not guaranteed. It is the right tool for learning, testing and tiny hobby sites, and the wrong one for anything that has to stay up. Our full InfinityFree review walks through the limits with the numbers.

WordPress.com (free) — a managed site, with their ads

WordPress.com's free plan is the easiest way to get a managed WordPress site online for nothing, with 1 GB of storage and no server to manage. The trade is steep and worth stating plainly: your site lives on a yoursite.wordpress.com subdomain, WordPress.com displays its own ads on your pages, and you cannot install plugins, upload themes or connect a custom domain until you pay. It is genuinely fine for a personal blog you do not mind branding, and a poor fit for anything that needs to look like your own. We cover where it fits in the truth about free WordPress hosting.

What "free" actually costs you

Every free host bills you in a currency other than dollars, and the whole skill of using free hosting well is knowing which currency you are paying in. There are six common ones. Ads: some free hosts, WordPress.com's free plan included, run their own advertising on your pages. A subdomain: many free plans give you a name like you.host.com rather than your own domain, which quietly tells every visitor the site is not fully yours. No email: almost no free host gives you a working inbox at your domain, so you cannot send or receive mail as [email protected]. Caps: hit limits, storage limits, build-minute limits and file-count limits that a growing site will eventually meet. Reliability: free tiers rarely carry an uptime guarantee, and support is a community forum, not a person. And the big one — the terms.

A free host can change its terms or shut down with little warning, and free plans are the first to go. In July 2024 Hostinger closed 000webhost — one of the best-known free hosts, running for 17 years — to new users, and shut it entirely that October. Build nothing on free hosting that you could not afford to lose overnight.

Free is genuinely the right answer when…

For a large set of real projects, paying for hosting would be wasting money. Free hosting is the correct choice — not a compromise — in these cases:

• A portfolio, résumé site or personal landing page that is static and low-traffic — Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages, with your own domain, for nothing.
• Documentation, a project site or an open-source landing page — GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages are purpose-built for exactly this.
• Learning: building your first site, testing WordPress, practising HTML and PHP — InfinityFree or any static host is a safe sandbox.
• A one-off marketing page, event site or campaign microsite with a known end date and no revenue attached to it.

In every one of those cases, a modern static host gives you HTTPS, a global network and your own domain for zero dollars, and paying would buy you nothing you need. Anyone who tells you those projects require paid hosting is selling something.

When you must stop and pay

Pay for hosting the moment the site stops being a hobby. The clear triggers are money, business, email, clients and uptime: if the site earns revenue, represents a company, needs mail at your own domain, belongs to a paying client, or simply must not go down, free hosting is now the expensive option because of what an outage or a suspension would cost you. The good news is that leaving free is cheap. A solid paid shared host runs a few dollars a month, and — this is the number that matters — you should look at the renewal price, not the introductory price, because the intro rate lasts one term and the renewal is what you actually pay year after year. Our guide to when to upgrade from free hosting lays out the triggers and the math.

When you do upgrade, the cheap, reputable options we point people to are Hostinger — advertised around 1.99 to 2.99 dollars a month on a long term, renewing near 10.99 (checked 2026-09-10) — and DreamHost, which lists a low intro rate renewing around 7.99 to 10.99 and has one of the longer money-back windows. Those two links are affiliate links: if you buy through them we earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes what we say. Prices move constantly, so check the current renewal price on the host's own site before you commit.

How we picked, and who pays us

We ranked these hosts on what they give a real user for free — bandwidth, a custom domain, HTTPS, the stack they support — and on how honestly they disclose the trade. We did not run our own uptime benchmarks and do not claim to; the limits and prices here come from each provider's published plans and terms, read on 2026-09-10, and we say when a number is advertised rather than measured. The independence is structural, not a promise: the six free hosts we recommend pay us nothing, and we earn only if you later choose a paid host through a clearly marked affiliate link. That is spelled out in full in our affiliate disclosure.