A Static Hosting Comparison: The Honest Rundown

You have a folder of files, or a page an AI just built you, and now you have to decide where it lives.

So you searched. The first ten results are comparison posts written by hosting companies, and each one arrives at the conclusion that the company which wrote it wins.

This one is written by a hosting company too. I run one.

Which is why a static hosting comparison is only worth your time if it names the situations where the author is the wrong answer, out loud, with reasons. There are several of those below and I have not hidden them at the bottom.

The second problem with most of these posts is the shape. They list vendors, then features, which only helps if you already know which features matter. You do not. You have a folder and a deadline.

So this is organised the other way round. Five questions about what you already have, then the table, then a plain list of who should pick what.

Start With What You Have, Not With The Vendors

Every real difference between these hosts traces back to five questions, and none of them are about speed. Answer these and the field collapses to two or three.

Do You Have A Folder, Or A Repository?

This is the biggest fork and almost nobody asks it first.

If your site is a folder on your desktop with an index.html inside it, you want a host that accepts a folder. That used to be a short, slightly embarrassing list. It is not any more.

Netlify Drop takes a dragged folder or a zip with no repository, and you do not have to sign in first, though a project dropped while signed out sits behind a temporary password until you claim it. Vercel added a drop page on 12 June 2026 that does the same thing, so the widely repeated claim that Vercel needs git or a CLI is now out of date. Cloudflare Pages calls it Direct Upload and takes a folder or a zip straight from the dashboard, with Wrangler as an option rather than a requirement. Tiiny Host has always worked this way. So do we. Each was checked against the vendor's own documentation in October 2026.

If your site is already a git repository, you have more options rather than fewer, because every host above also connects to a repo, and GitHub Pages only works that way.

The mistake worth avoiding is the reverse move: creating a repository you did not need in order to satisfy a host that demanded one. If you have never used git, learning it to publish a one-page site is a week of your life spent on a tool you picked by accident.

Does Anything Have To Be Built?

A build step is a command that turns source files into a folder a browser can actually read. npm run build, hugo, jekyll build. Something goes in, a dist or build or public folder comes out, and only the output belongs on a server.

If you have plain HTML, CSS and images, there is no build step, and a host that advertises build minutes is selling you a feature you will never touch.

If you have a React, Astro, Next or Hugo project, you have two routes. Run the build on your own machine and upload the output folder, which works on every host in this post. Or connect the repository and let the host run the command on every push, which Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Pages all do, and which GitHub Pages does for Jekyll natively and for everything else through Actions.

For a site that changes twice a year, I build locally and upload the folder. The pipeline is a lovely thing to own when you deploy daily and a strange thing to maintain when you deploy in March and November. what actually gets uploaded for a React project covers the build output question properly, including the one that breaks first.

Do You Need Your Own Domain, Or Will A Subdomain Do?

Every host in this post hands you a free subdomain, and for a draft, a client preview or a link you will send twice, a subdomain is the correct answer rather than the cheap one. Nobody judges the address of a work in progress.

The free tiers split hard on custom domains, though, and this is where a comparison based on marketing pages goes wrong.

Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages all let you point a domain you own at a free site. Tiiny Host does not: custom domains start at its Solo plan and above, per its own helpdesk guide in October 2026. WordPress.com's free plan does not either, and free sites there also carry WordPress.com's own ads. Ours are a paid feature, and the plan page is the only place I will quote our numbers, because anything I type here freezes the day we change it.

One thing that is genuinely settled: the certificate. Every host on this list issues HTTPS automatically and none of them charge for it, so if a comparison table still has a column for SSL pricing it was written a decade ago. what an SSL certificate actually costs goes through the handful of cases where paying still makes sense.

Is This Permanent, Or Is It A Link You Send Once?

Temporary work changes the answer completely, and most people apply permanent-site criteria to a link that will be dead in a fortnight.

For a proposal, a demo, an event page or a file you need somebody to open this afternoon, the only metric that matters is how many steps stand between the folder and the URL. Account creation is a step. Connecting a git provider is four. On that measure the drop pages win outright, and Netlify Drop wins hardest because it hands you a URL before it asks who you are, even if that URL carries a temporary password until you claim the project.

For anything permanent, the boring questions are the ones that bite eighteen months later. Who owns the account, what happens when the free tier changes, and can you get every file back out in one download. A site you cannot export is a site you are renting from your past self.

Will Somebody Else Take This Over?

If you are building this for a client, an employer or a committee, the handover is a real requirement and it disqualifies hosts that are otherwise excellent.

The test I use is simple. Can the person who inherits this change a phone number on the page without calling me?

On GitHub Pages the honest answer is no. Editing means a commit, and a non-technical owner will not commit. On a drag-and-drop host the answer is usually yes, because the update is the same action as the original publish. On a builder like Carrd or Google Sites it is emphatically yes, which is why those products exist.

Then there is account ownership, which people get wrong. If the site sits in your personal account and you hand over a password, you have not handed over anything, you have shared a credential. Look for a transfer or collaborator feature before you build, not after the relationship ends.

A Static Hosting Comparison Table, Sorted By What You Have

Here is the field on the four axes that decide it. I have left speed out on purpose: every host here serves static files from a global network and the difference between them is smaller than one uncompressed photograph on your page.

Checked October 2026. Every claim behind those cells is sourced in one of the two sections below, because a table with no date on it is a table that was true once.

Free Tiers: Where Each One Actually Stops

The free tiers are not equivalent and the differences are not about generosity. They are about what each company is protecting.

• Netlify runs its free plan on a monthly credit budget rather than a bandwidth allowance. Free is zero dollars with a 300 credit limit, and the first paid tier, Personal, is nine dollars a month with 1,000 credits. Credits are spent across deploys, bandwidth and compute, and on the free plan there is no overage to buy. Run out and every project on the team pauses, not just the busy one. Netlify's pricing and billing pages, October 2026.
• Vercel gives the Hobby plan 100 GB of fast data transfer and 100 deployments a day, with 50 domains per project. The clause that catches people is not a number: the Hobby plan is restricted to non-commercial, personal use. A shop, a client site or a SaaS landing page belongs on Pro, which is a twenty dollar monthly platform fee covering one deploying seat and twenty dollars of usage credit, with each extra deploying seat twenty more. Vercel's Hobby and Pro plan documentation, October 2026.
• Cloudflare Pages allows 20,000 files per site on the free plan, a 25 MiB ceiling on any single file, 500 builds a month and one build at a time, with up to 100 custom domains per project. Requests to static assets are free and unlimited on both the free and the paid plans, in Cloudflare's own words. Cloudflare's Pages limits and pricing documentation, October 2026.
• GitHub Pages publishes sites up to 1 GB, with a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB a month and a soft limit of 10 builds an hour. It is explicitly not allowed as free hosting for an online business or an ecommerce site, and on a free account switching the repository to private unpublishes the site. GitHub's Pages limits documentation, October 2026.
• Tiiny Host gives a free site a tiiny.site subdomain and a banner, and reserves custom domains for paid plans. Its published plans start at nine dollars a month, with the custom-domain tier above that. Tiiny Host's helpdesk pricing article, October 2026.
• static.app has no permanent free plan any more: the zero dollar option is a seven day trial of one site and 50 MB. After that the cheapest tier is six dollars a month, or sixty for a year, and the page leads with the annual figure divided by twelve. Watch for that on every host here. static.app's pricing page, October 2026.
• InfinityFree is the outlier and deserves credit for it: a genuinely free plan with 5 GB of disk, PHP 8.4, MySQL, free SSL, custom domains and no ads injected into your site. The ceiling that actually bites is 30,000 files or 5 GB, whichever comes first, with 10 MB per file. InfinityFree's own hosting page, October 2026.

Read that list twice and you will notice two rules that are not numbers. Vercel's non-commercial clause and GitHub's no-business clause are the ones that end badly, because nothing warns you at upload time. A number you exceed produces an error. A rule you break produces an email.

The Hosts That Are Not There Any More

Much of the hosting advice online points at services that have closed, and the tutorials outlive the products by years.

Checked October 2026.

000webhost was the default answer to "free PHP hosting" for seventeen years. Hostinger closed it to new users on 8 July 2024 and shut it down completely on 14 October 2024, migrating those who wanted it onto paid plans, according to Hostinger's own closure announcement. If you are looking for a like-for-like replacement, InfinityFree is the closest thing still running, and it is genuinely free rather than a trial.

Glitch was the friendliest place on the internet to remix a small app. On 8 July 2025 project hosting and user profiles were switched off, with the dashboard kept open until the end of that year so people could download their code. That window closed at the end of 2025 and the files were deleted, so there is nothing left to retrieve. The Register on Glitch shutting down app hosting Static pages from Glitch move to any host in the table above without changes, and the Glitch alternatives help you pick one. Node apps do not, and need a platform that runs a server.

And the one people still try weekly: putting an HTML file in a public Drive folder and expecting a web page. Google announced the deprecation on 31 August 2015 and switched the serving URLs off a year later, and the guides describing it never got taken down, which is why people still find them. what happened to the Google Drive hosting trick has the full timeline and what Drive still does with an HTML file today.

Where This One Is The Wrong Answer

The honest section. Four situations where I would tell you to go elsewhere, and every one of them is a real limit rather than a plan you can upgrade out of.

Anything that runs code on a server. PHP, a database, WordPress, Laravel, a login system. A static host serves files exactly as stored and never executes them, so this is not a limitation to work around, it is the category boundary. If that is your project, InfinityFree or a normal cPanel host will do what we cannot. what a static website actually is draws the line properly.

A single-page app with real URLs. OxyPages has no catch-all rewrite. If your router serves /about from JavaScript and no about.html exists as a real file, that address returns a 404 when somebody refreshes it or opens the link directly. There is a workaround, publishing a copy of index.html named 404.html, and it costs you a 404 status code, which is fine internally and wrong for anything you want indexed. Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Pages all handle this properly. Pick one of them.

Anything with a build step you want run for you. We do not run builds. You build locally and upload the output, which is a perfectly good workflow and a genuinely worse one if you deploy several times a day from a repository.

Files outside a short allowlist. We serve HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, common image formats, fonts and PDF, plus robots.txt and sitemap.xml. A .zip is refused, and so is a .csv, so zipping the data first does not get you past it. If your whole reason for hosting is handing someone a downloadable archive, we are the wrong shop.

Say all that out loud and the recommendation that follows means something. A comparison where one column wins every row is a brochure.

Pick This One If

• Tiiny Host if you want the fastest possible route from a zip file to a link and you do not mind a banner on the free tier. If the banner bothers you, see the Tiiny Host alternatives.
• Netlify if you have a repository with a build step, or you want the most forgiving drop page in the business. When the credits pinch, compare the Netlify alternatives.
• Vercel if the project is Next.js, or it needs server rendering and API routes. Just not on Hobby if it is commercial: that means Pro. For a site that's only HTML files, a Vercel alternative for plain HTML fits better.
• Cloudflare Pages if traffic could spike and you do not want a bandwidth bill, since bandwidth is not metered there. If a whole Cloudflare account is more than one page needs, try a simpler Cloudflare Pages alternative.
• GitHub Pages if the site is open source, documentation, or anything already living in a public repository, and nobody non-technical has to edit it. If someone will, see a GitHub Pages alternative without git.
• static.app if you want plain uploads plus a deploy step in CI and will pay for it, since it ships a GitHub Action and Tiiny Host does not.
• InfinityFree if you actually need PHP and MySQL for nothing and a control panel does not scare you. For a plain HTML site, an InfinityFree alternative for simple sites skips the FTP.
• Carrd or Google Sites if you have no files yet and want to build a one-page site inside an editor. Already holding HTML? Then you want a Carrd alternative or a Google Sites alternative.
• WordPress.com if you are writing a blog and want the writing tools more than the file control.
• OxyPages if you have finished HTML, want it live and on your own domain without a build pipeline, and want to hand it to a client afterwards.

What To Do Next

Pick using the five questions, not the table, which is a checking tool.

1. Look in your folder. If there is an index.html, you have a folder site and a drop page is your shortest route.
2. Check for a package.json or a config.toml. If either exists, something has to be built, so decide now whether you build it or the host does.
3. Decide the address. Subdomain for anything temporary, your own domain for anything commercial.
4. Publish once to the free tier before you pay anybody. Every host here lets you.
5. Open the result on your phone, on mobile data, on a browser that has never seen the page.

If you want the mechanics of step one rather than the choice, how to host an HTML file and get a link is the short version, and what HTML hosting means and what it includes is the longer one. If you have already decided and just want the folder online, drag your folder in and get a live link takes about a minute and keeps your file structure exactly as it sits on your desk.

Then stop comparing. This decision eats an afternoon because the differences are small and the tables are long, and a site live on a free subdomain today beats the perfect host you are still researching on Friday. Any static hosting comparison, including this one, is worth about twenty minutes.