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Free Website Hosting: What to Evaluate First
Use free hosting only when its limits, commercial-use terms, and maintenance burden fit the website you are actually running.
Quick answer
Free hosting can be a sensible long-term choice for a small static website, but only after you check commercial-use terms, custom-domain support, traffic and build limits, and what happens when you need forms or server-side work. Free is not automatically the lowest-cost route if no one can maintain the publishing workflow.
Sources: Cloudflare, GitHub, Vercel
The practical comparison
The useful comparison is not which service is “free,” but whether its current plan terms and limits fit a commercial static site.
| Provider | Best for | Starting cost | Key limitation | Scout verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages Free | A commercial static site with a technical workflow. | Static asset requests are free and unlimited; Free allows 500 builds per month. | Functions use Workers quotas and the free plan has build and file limits. | A practical option for a lightweight business site that can be deployed from code or prebuilt files. |
| GitHub Pages | A very small static site maintained through GitHub. | No separate Pages price is shown in the limits documentation. | Published sites are limited to 1 GB with a 100 GB/month soft bandwidth limit. | Works when the site and publishing process stay simple and within GitHub’s documented limits. |
| Vercel Hobby | Personal, non-commercial projects only. | US$0/month Hobby plan. | Vercel labels Hobby personal and non-commercial. | Not a free-hosting recommendation for a commercial business site. |
Free works best for a stable static site
A brochure site with pages, images, a contact link, and no private customer data is a realistic candidate for free static hosting. Cloudflare Pages documents free static asset requests and clear project limits; GitHub Pages documents size, bandwidth, and build limits for published sites.
The phrase “free hosting” does not cover domain registration, email, paid templates, professional support, or the time to keep the site current. Budget those separately.
Sources: Cloudflare Pages pricing, Cloudflare Pages limits, GitHub Pages limits
Rule out plans that are not licensed for the business
Terms matter as much as quotas. Vercel identifies its Hobby plan as personal and non-commercial, so it should not be the free deployment choice for a business site.
Before launch, read the provider’s current plan page and check whether your use is commercial, whether the site needs team access, and whether a paid upgrade will be required when usage grows.
Sources: Vercel pricing and plan eligibility
Evaluate the next requirement before it becomes an outage
Ask whether the site needs a form, appointment booking, ecommerce checkout, database, authenticated customer area, or server-side processing. A static host may still work, but those functions can consume a separate product’s quota or require a different architecture.
Cloudflare Pages Functions, for example, count toward Workers usage. Treat that as a separate decision from serving static pages.
Sources: Cloudflare Pages pricing
Sources checked 15 July 2026
Primary documentation used for this guide. Product terms, prices, and government rules can change, so follow the linked source for the current version.
- Cloudflare Pages pricing · Cloudflare
- Cloudflare Pages limits · Cloudflare
- GitHub Pages limits · GitHub
- About custom domains and GitHub Pages · GitHub
- Vercel pricing and plan eligibility · Vercel