The best free website hosting in 2026: an honest comparison
Kofi Agyem, Founder and CEO, CloudzyroPublished · 6 min read
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Free hosting from Cloudzyro, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel and Render compared on real limits, business use and what happens when busy.
1. The short answer
For a static site, Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages are excellent and free. For an app with a server that must stay awake and may be used for business, Cloudzyro's free Launch plan fits. For personal Next.js projects, Vercel Hobby is hard to beat. Netlify Free and Render's free tier are good for trying things out, with limits worth understanding first.
We're a hosting company, and Cloudzyro is in this list. We've tried to be fair: every figure for other hosts comes from their own pages, checked on November 1, 2026 and linked at the end. Plans change, so check the source before you decide.
2. What to look for in free hosting
- What it can run. Static files only, or a server too, such as Node.js or Next.js API routes?
- Business use. Some free plans are for personal projects only.
- Sleeping. Does a quiet app go to sleep, so the next visitor waits?
- What happens at the limit. Is your site paused, slowed, or are you asked to wait or upgrade?
- Custom domains and HTTPS. All six here include both.
- A way out. Can you move later without rewriting? Standard frameworks and Git make that easy.
3. Cloudzyro Launch
Best for: apps and sites built with AI, small business sites, and Node.js apps that need to stay awake.
- Free, with business use allowed and no time limit.
- Runs static sites, sites with a build step (Vite, React and so on) and Node.js apps, including Next.js.
- Each site gets 1 CPU, 512 MB of memory and 100 GB of traffic a month, and never sleeps.
- Over its traffic, a site is slowed to 2 Mbit/s for the rest of the month, never taken offline and never charged.
- Your AI tool can deploy for you: Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor and Codex connect through our MCP server. Or connect GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, or upload a zip.
- Custom domains are free, with automatic HTTPS, and your last 5 versions are kept so you can restore one in a click.
Trade-offs: sites have no permanent disk, so data goes in a database such as Supabase or Neon. Sites & Apps runs static sites and Node.js; Python and other languages aren't supported there. Servers are in London, with static files served by Cloudflare close to your visitors. The paid plan is Boost, $20 a month per site, with no per-seat charges. See Sites & Apps and pricing.
4. GitHub Pages
Best for: documentation, open-source project pages, personal sites and portfolios kept in a public GitHub repository.
- Static files only (HTML, CSS and JavaScript), published from your repository or by your own GitHub Actions workflow.
- Free in public repositories on GitHub Free.
- Published sites can be up to 1 GB, with a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB a month and a soft limit of 10 builds an hour (which doesn't apply to custom Actions workflows).
Trade-offs: GitHub says Pages “is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site”, or commercial software as a service. There's no server code, so forms and databases need outside services.
5. Cloudflare Pages
Best for: static sites and front-end apps that may get a lot of traffic.
- Requests to static assets are free and unlimited, according to Cloudflare's Workers pricing.
- Free plan: 500 builds a month, one build at a time, a 20-minute build timeout, up to 20,000 files per site and 25 MiB per file, and 100 custom domains per project.
- Pages Functions count toward the Workers free plan: 100,000 requests a day, with 10 ms of CPU time per invocation.
Trade-offs: server code runs as functions on Cloudflare's Workers platform, not as an ordinary long-running Node.js server, so some Node.js apps need adapting. Generous for static sites; less suited to a traditional server app.
6. Netlify Free
Best for: trying Netlify, and small static sites with low traffic.
- 300 credits a month, as a hard limit.
- Bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB, each production deploy 15 credits, compute 10 credits per GB-hour and web requests 2 credits per 10,000. Deploy previews cost nothing.
- Custom domains with HTTPS, and functions, included.
Trade-offs: if all 300 credits went on bandwidth, that's 15 GB a month. Netlify says that once the balance is used up, “all of your web projects (sites/apps) are paused” and visitors see a “Site not available” page, and free accounts can't buy more credits. Good for experiments; risky for anything people rely on. More in our Netlify alternatives comparison.
7. Vercel Hobby
Best for: personal Next.js projects and portfolios.
- Includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 1 million function invocations, 4 hours of Active CPU and 1 million CDN requests a month.
- Up to 100 deployments a day and 50 domains per project.
Trade-offs: Vercel says “the Hobby plan restricts users to non-commercial, personal use only”, so a business site needs Pro, at $20 a month per developer seat. If you go over a limit, Vercel says that in most cases you'll have to wait until 30 days have passed before you can use that feature again. More in our Vercel alternatives comparison.
8. Render free
Best for: trying out a backend, side projects and demos where a slow first load is fine.
- Free static sites, and free web services.
- 750 free instance hours per workspace each month.
- Free Postgres databases, which expire 30 days after creation, with 14 days' grace to upgrade before they're deleted.
Trade-offs: free web services spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and take about a minute to start again, so the next visitor waits. If you go over the included bandwidth with no payment method on file, Render suspends free services for the rest of the month.
9. Which free host should you choose?
- A static portfolio or docs site in a public repository: GitHub Pages.
- A static site that might get a lot of traffic: Cloudflare Pages.
- A personal Next.js project: Vercel Hobby.
- A business site or app with a server, often built with AI, that must stay awake: Cloudzyro Launch.
- A quick backend demo in a language other than JavaScript: Render free, accepting the sleep.
- A small experiment on Netlify's platform: Netlify Free, watching your credits.
- WordPress: none of these. You'll want PHP hosting; see how to host a website.
Whichever you choose, keep your code in Git and use a standard framework, so moving later is a matter of connecting the repository somewhere else.
10. Putting a free site online
Most free hosts work the same way: connect a Git repository or upload your files, wait for the build, then add your domain. If you built your site with an AI tool, you can skip a step on Cloudzyro: connect it once and ask it to put the site online. See how to deploy a site built with Claude, or the setup for ChatGPT, Cursor and Lovable.
11. Sources
Checked on November 1, 2026.