Free Static Website Hosting: What Each Free Plan Really Allows
Free static website hosting is real and permanent on several platforms. GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, Firebase Hosting and Neocities all host a static site at no cost. The difference is how much traffic each free plan carries, what happens when you pass the limit, and whether a business may use it.
Most comparisons stop at "free tier: yes". That tells you nothing about the day your site gets shared and the traffic arrives. So instead of listing features, I took each free plan's published limits and worked out what they mean for a real site: how many visits fit in a month, and what visitors see when the allowance runs out.
One disclosure: this is the HTMLpad blog. HTMLpad hosts single HTML pages, not whole sites, so it is not in this comparison. If you only need one page online, the guide to free HTML hosting is the better read.
How I compared them
Every figure comes from each platform's own documentation or pricing page, checked on 13 November 2026. Free plans change often, so check again before you rely on one.
To make the limits comparable, I turned bandwidth into visits. I assumed a visit downloads 1 MB, which is a small site with a few optimised images. If your pages are heavier, divide the visit counts below by the weight of a typical visit in megabytes. Repeat visitors cost less, because browsers cache files, so these numbers are on the cautious side.
The free plans at a glance
| Platform | Free traffic allowance | About how many 1 MB visits a month | At the limit | Commercial restriction on the free plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | No bandwidth limit published | No published ceiling | Not applicable | None published |
| GitHub Pages | 100 GB a month, soft limit | About 100,000 | GitHub may contact you or rate limit | Not for online businesses or e-commerce |
| Vercel (Hobby) | 100 GB a month | About 100,000 | Usage pauses until 30 days have passed | Personal, non-commercial use only |
| Netlify (Free) | 300 credits a month; 1 GB costs 20 | At most about 15,000 | All your sites are paused | None published |
| Firebase Hosting (Spark) | 360 MB a day | About 10,800 | Hosting stops until the next day | None published |
| Neocities (free) | 200 GB a month | About 200,000 | Not stated | None published; free sites limited to certain file types |
Three results surprised me.
Netlify's free plan is the smallest of the big names. Since its move to credits, the free plan includes 300 credits a month as a hard limit. Netlify's documentation prices bandwidth at 20 credits per GB, each production deploy at 15 credits and every 10,000 requests at 2 credits. If you deploy ten times in a month, that is 150 credits gone before anyone visits. And when the balance hits zero, Netlify says "all of your web projects (sites/apps) are paused and visitors to your web projects will find a Site not available page".
Firebase counts by the day, not the month. Firebase's pricing page gives the Spark plan 10 GB of storage and 360 MB of transfer a day. That is fine for steady, small traffic, but a single busy day can use it up while the rest of the month sits idle.
The two most generous plans come with rules. GitHub Pages and Vercel both allow around 100 GB a month, but GitHub's limits page says Pages is not meant as free hosting for online businesses, e-commerce or commercial software, and Vercel's Hobby plan is restricted to personal, non-commercial use.
Cloudflare Pages
Cloudflare Pages deploys a static site from a Git repository or an uploaded folder to Cloudflare's network. Its free plan allows 500 builds a month, up to 20,000 files per site, 25 MiB per file and 100 custom domains per project. It publishes no bandwidth limit for static files.
Where it is strong: the most room to grow of any free plan here, custom domains included, and fast delivery worldwide.
Where it is weak: you need a Cloudflare account and a little setup. For a site that will never get much traffic, the extra capacity makes no difference.
Best for: any static site that might get busy, including small business sites.
GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages publishes a site straight from a repository, at a github.io address or on your own domain, with HTTPS. The published site can be up to 1 GB, with a soft limit of 100 GB of bandwidth and 10 builds an hour.
Where it is strong: permanent, free, and every change is kept in the repository's history. If you already use GitHub, there is almost nothing to set up.
Where it is weak: the commercial rule. A portfolio, a project page or documentation is fine; a shop is not. On the free GitHub plan, Pages works from public repositories only.
Best for: personal sites, documentation and open source projects.
Vercel
Vercel's Hobby plan is free and includes 100 GB of fast data transfer and a million CDN requests a month, plus up to 50 domains per project. Vercel says that if you exceed a Hobby limit, you usually wait until 30 days have passed before the feature works again.
Where it is strong: a generous allowance, a polished dashboard, and an easy path to frameworks if the site grows into an app.
Where it is weak: the Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use only, so a business site belongs on the Pro plan.
Best for: personal projects and portfolios, especially ones built with a framework.
Netlify
Netlify builds and hosts static sites from Git or a dropped folder. The free plan is now 300 credits a month, shared between bandwidth, requests, deploys and any other features you use.
Where it is strong: a mature platform with deploy previews, which cost no credits, and an easy drag-and-drop route for sites without Git.
Where it is weak: at about 15 GB of bandwidth at most, the free plan suits small sites. The hard limit pauses every site on the account at once.
Best for: small sites that stay well within the allowance, especially if you already know Netlify.
Firebase Hosting
Firebase Hosting is Google's static hosting, part of the Firebase app platform. The free Spark plan includes 10 GB of storage, 360 MB of transfer a day, a custom domain and SSL.
Where it is strong: a custom domain on the free plan, and an easy step up if the site later needs a database or sign-in from the rest of Firebase.
Where it is weak: the daily transfer cap is small, and setup goes through the Firebase command-line tool.
Best for: sites that belong to a Firebase app, or quiet sites with steady traffic.
Neocities
Neocities is a community of personal websites, in the spirit of the early web. The free plan gives 1 GB of storage and 200 GB of bandwidth, but only for certain file types, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, text, fonts and images. The $5 a month supporter plan raises the storage to 50 GB and removes the file type limits.
Where it is strong: an editor in the browser, no command line, and a friendly community. It is a good first home for a hand-written site.
Where it is weak: free sites are served more slowly than on the supporter plan, and the file type limits rule out things like downloadable PDFs.
Best for: personal and hobby sites, and people learning to build websites by hand.
Which free plan fits your site
- A business site, or anything that might sell: Cloudflare Pages. It publishes no commercial restriction and no bandwidth ceiling.
- A personal site or project you already keep on GitHub: GitHub Pages.
- A personal site built with a framework: Vercel's Hobby plan.
- A hand-written personal site: Neocities.
Whichever you pick, put the site on your own domain. If the free plan changes, and they do, you can move the files to another host and keep the address, the links and the search rankings that point to it. That is also the moment to read what a static website is and where its limits are, because a site that needs logins, payments or a database has outgrown static hosting.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free static website hosting?
For most sites, Cloudflare Pages: it publishes no commercial restriction or bandwidth limit, and includes custom domains. GitHub Pages is just as good for personal and open source sites, but not for online businesses.
Is free static hosting really free forever?
On these platforms the free plans have no end date, unlike a trial. What changes is the plan itself: Netlify, for example, moved its free plan to monthly credits. Keeping your site on your own domain makes it easy to move if that happens.
How much traffic can a free static site handle?
It depends on the plan and on page weight. With visits of about 1 MB, GitHub Pages and Vercel allow around 100,000 a month, Netlify's free credits cover at most about 15,000, and Firebase about 360 a day.
Can I use free static hosting for a business website?
GitHub Pages excludes online businesses and e-commerce, and Vercel's Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use only. Cloudflare Pages, Netlify and Firebase publish no such restriction on their free plans, but read each one's terms before you commit.