Cloudflare Pages, Netlify and Vercel will host a site for nothing, faster than anything you can buy. The catch is what they cannot run, and the licence terms nobody reads.
There is a category of hosting that is genuinely free — not a trial, not ad-supported, not a loss-leader with a renewal cliff — and it is faster than most paid hosting. It also cannot run WordPress, which is why most people never consider it.
What free static hosting actually is
Your site is built into plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, either by you or by a static site generator (Astro, Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll, Next.js in export mode). Those files are copied to a global edge network and served from whichever city the visitor is nearest. There is no PHP, no database, no server to patch, and nothing to hack — because there is no application running.
The performance is not close. Cloudflare has edge locations in London, Manchester and Edinburgh among 330+ cities; a UK visitor gets a file from a machine a few miles away. No shared host, however well tuned, competes with that.
The three options
| Cloudflare Pages | Netlify | Vercel | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/mo | 100 GB bandwidth, 300 build min/mo | 100 GB bandwidth, Hobby only |
| Commercial use on free tier | Permitted | Permitted | Not permitted |
| Best at | Raw speed, generous limits | Forms, identity, developer experience | Next.js, anything React |
| Overage risk | Low — bandwidth is unmetered | Can be expensive | Can be expensive |
| Serverless functions | Workers | Netlify Functions | Vercel Functions |
Read that third row. Vercel's Hobby tier prohibits commercial use — a business site on it is a terms violation, and people do get emails about it. Cloudflare and Netlify permit commercial use on their free tiers. That distinction matters more than any performance difference.
When this is clearly the right choice
- Documentation, marketing sites, landing pages, portfolios — anything where the content changes when you decide it does, not when a user submits something.
- Anything you already build with a generator. If the output is HTML files, paying a host to run PHP for it is money for nothing.
- Sites that need to survive attention. A static site on Cloudflare does not fall over when a post reaches the front page of something. There is no database to exhaust.
- Headless WordPress. Keep WordPress as the editing interface on cheap hosting, and deploy the public front end to the edge. Editors get the admin they know; visitors get static files.
When it is the wrong choice
- You want to log in and edit pages in a browser. Static hosting means a Git commit and a build. Headless CMSs and tools like Decap or Sanity soften this, but it is a different workflow and non-technical editors often hate it.
- You need forms, comments, search, memberships or a shop. All possible with third-party services and serverless functions; all more work than installing a plugin.
- The site is already WordPress and works. Rebuilding a functioning WordPress site as a static one to save £6/month is a poor use of a weekend.
The honest comparison for a small business
A five-page site for a local business could be an Astro build on Cloudflare Pages for £0/month, loading in under half a second from a UK edge node, with nothing to update or secure, ever. That is objectively the better technical answer.
It is the wrong answer if the owner wants to change their opening hours themselves on a Tuesday afternoon. Then it is WordPress.com or WordPress on a decent host, and the £6/month is buying an editing interface rather than a server.
That is the actual trade in almost every hosting decision: you are rarely paying for compute. You are paying for the interface, the person who answers when it breaks, and the option to change your mind later.
Published 14 July 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.