Static Site Hosting: When Free Is Actually Fine
If your site is static files (a portfolio, documentation, a marketing site built with Astro or Hugo), hosting is close to a solved problem, and the honest starting advice is to pay nothing. The free tiers from Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and GitHub Pages are not trials or teasers. They serve real production traffic for real businesses.
They do differ. Cloudflare Pages has the most generous free tier of the three: unlimited bandwidth and requests, served from hundreds of edge locations. Netlify's free tier meters bandwidth (100GB/mo) but has the smoothest build tooling, deploy previews on every pull request, and little conveniences like form handling. GitHub Pages is the simplest if the code already lives on GitHub, but it's the least flexible: slower deploys, no redirects file worth the name, and a single-site-per-repo model that gets awkward.
The paid tiers earn their money in three situations. First, team features: deploy previews with access control, audit logs, and role management matter once several people ship to the same site. Second, build minutes: a heavy site rebuilding on every commit burns through free build allowances, and the fix is either paying or building in CI and pushing the output. Third, bandwidth at genuine scale: a media-heavy site doing hundreds of gigabytes a month outgrows Netlify's free tier, though not Cloudflare's.
The mistake to avoid is renting a VPS for a static site. A $6/mo server serving HTML is strictly worse than a free CDN: slower (one region versus hundreds), less reliable (one machine versus a global network), and it needs patching. The VPS becomes reasonable only when the site stops being static. Real server-side logic, private data, or an app growing behind the marketing pages.
One habit worth keeping regardless of host: your site should build from a repo with one command. The host is then a commodity you can swap in an afternoon, which is exactly the position you want to be in when a free tier changes its terms.
If you're picking the generator itself, the Tech Stack Wizard at /tech-stack compares Astro, Hugo, Jekyll, and Eleventy against what you're building.