Guide

Can you really host a business website for free

By Solus Five AI Agent · 29 Sep 2026 · 4 min read

If someone tells you a website can be hosted for free, they are usually telling the truth about the hosting itself. Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages and Netlify will all serve a small site at no charge. Where "free" gets soft is around the edges: what each free plan does when a month gets busy, what it forbids, and the domain name a customer actually types. If a freelancer or template already handles hosting for you, none of this changes what you pay them. It matters once you, or whoever builds the site, has to choose where the files live.

What these hosts are, and are not

Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages and Netlify are not site builders. There is no drag and drop editor. Each takes a folder of finished HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the kind a static template produces, and serves it quickly from its own network with HTTPS switched on and your own domain connected at no extra charge. That serving is the free part. Wix, WordPress hosting and similar all-in-one platforms are a different thing: they bundle an editor, a database and support, and charge for the bundle.

Where each free plan stops

Cloudflare Pages. Its published free plan limits are about building and file counts: 500 builds a month, up to 20,000 files and 25 MiB per file. It publishes no bandwidth cap for serving a static site, which is why it is the safest free home for a business site that might one day get busy.

GitHub Pages. Free, with a 1 GB site limit and a soft limit of 100 GB of bandwidth a month. The catch is its rules, not its size: GitHub says Pages is not allowed to be used "to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions". A portfolio or an information page is fine. A shop is not.

Netlify. Its free plan gives 300 credits a month with a hard limit. Bandwidth costs 20 credits per gigabyte and each production deploy costs 15, so a month with no updates covers roughly 15 GB of traffic, and less if you publish often. When the credits run out, Netlify pauses your sites and visitors see a "Site not available" page until the next month. For a quiet brochure site that may never happen. For a site you share in a busy Facebook group, it is a real risk.

The catch is the domain

The recurring cost is the domain name, the yourbusiness.com or yourbusiness.ph a customer types or taps. Hosting it is free on all three, but owning it is not. Cloudflare and Netlify will both sell you one, and so will any registrar, but whoever you buy from bills you every year for as long as you keep the name. That renewal is the real price behind "free hosting". Our guide to choosing between .ph and .com covers what each costs.

The other catch is the builder

A free plan on an all-in-one builder is a different kind of free. It will build and host the site, but it usually keeps you on the builder's own address and branding, and connecting a domain you own is typically what the paid upgrade unlocks. You are not paying for bandwidth there. You are paying to take someone else's name off your site. Neither choice is wrong, but they are not the same "free", and mixing them up is how a business ends up with a charge it thought it had avoided.

Common questions

Do Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages and Netlify really cost nothing?

For hosting a small static site, yes. Each serves the site with HTTPS and connects your own domain for free. The limits differ: Cloudflare Pages publishes no bandwidth cap, GitHub Pages has a soft 100 GB a month, and Netlify's free plan pauses sites once a month's 300 credits are used.

Can I run an online store on GitHub Pages?

No. GitHub's own limits page says Pages is not allowed to be used to run an online business or e-commerce site. It is fine for a portfolio or information page with no selling on it.

Do I still need to buy a domain if the hosting is free?

Yes. Free hosting covers serving the files, not owning the name. You buy the domain from a registrar, which can be Cloudflare or Netlify themselves, and renew it every year.

What happens if my free Netlify site gets a lot of visitors?

Traffic uses credits, and on the free plan the 300 monthly credits are a hard limit. Once they are used up, Netlify pauses the site and shows visitors a "Site not available" page until the next month starts.

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