Static Hosting

Static hosting is the simplest corner of cloud hosting and, for a huge range of sites, the best place to start. You build your site once — by hand or with a framework like Astro, Next.js, Hugo or Vite — and the host serves the resulting files from a global CDN. There is no server to keep running, which is exactly why the free tiers are so generous and the performance so good.

The platforms in this category compete on developer experience as much as on limits. Connect a Git repository and they build on every push, give each pull request a live preview URL, and ship the result worldwide with automatic HTTPS. Cloudflare Pages, Vercel and Netlify are the popular choices, and they overlap heavily — the right pick usually comes down to which ecosystem you prefer and how your bandwidth and build-minute usage maps to each one’s free allowance.

When comparing free tiers, focus on bandwidth first, because that is the limit most people reach before any other. After that, weigh build minutes (if you build from source), the number of sites and team seats allowed, and whether features like preview deployments and custom domains are included for free. For dynamic needs, remember that static hosting pairs naturally with serverless functions and backend-as-a-service platforms, so “static” rarely means “can’t do anything interactive.”