Static hosting serves pre-built HTML, CSS and JS straight from a CDN — the fastest, cheapest and most reliable way to put a website online for free.
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.”
Cloudflare Pages NEW Cloudflare Cloudflare Pages is a JAMstack platform for frontend developers to collaborate and deploy websites on Cloudflare's global edge network.
Free tier
Unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month
Paid from $5/mo (Workers Paid) · 310+ cities
Netlify Netlify Inc. Netlify is a web developer platform that multiplies productivity by unifying the elements of the modern decoupled web.
Free tier
100GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes/month
Paid from $19/mo · Global CDN
Vercel Vercel Inc. Vercel is the platform for frontend developers, providing the speed and reliability innovators need to create at the moment of inspiration.
Free tier
100GB bandwidth, 100 deployments/day
Paid from $20/mo · 100+ edge
A static host builds and serves your whole site (often including a build step and Git integration), while a CDN simply caches and distributes files you already have. Most static hosts run on a CDN under the hood, so you get both.
Not directly — static hosts serve files, not servers. But most pair with serverless functions or external APIs (and a BaaS like Supabase or Firebase) so you can add dynamic behavior without leaving the free tier.
For blogs, docs, marketing sites and most SPAs, yes. The usual limit is monthly bandwidth, so a content-heavy or high-traffic site is where you'd eventually upgrade.