What’s the cheapest way to host a small business website?

TL;DR

For a static or pre-rendered small business website (5–20 pages, no e-commerce), Cloudflare Pages free tier hosts the site at $0/month with unlimited traffic relevant to small business volumes. The only ongoing cost is the domain, typically $10–15/year. Total annual cost: roughly the price of a single tank of gas.

The pricing model for small business website hosting changed dramatically between 2018 and 2026. Static-site hosting on edge networks: Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, GitHub Pages, Vercel, became free at the volumes most small businesses ever see, and the underlying hosting quality improved past what shared hosting (the old default at $5–15/month) ever offered.

The catch is that "free static hosting" requires the site to be static, pre-built HTML, no server-side databases, no PHP. That’s fine for most small business websites, which are essentially online brochures. It’s not fine for sites that need a backend (a custom booking system, a member portal, a real-time inventory feed).

For a typical small business, service-based, no e-commerce, under 20 pages, under 100,000 monthly visitors, the cost stack is: domain registration $10–15/year, hosting $0/month on Cloudflare Pages, optional managed updates $0–10/month. Total: under $25/year before any optional services.

Key facts

Cloudflare Pages free tier: unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds per month, 100 custom domains.
Netlify free tier: 100 GB bandwidth/month, 300 build minutes, 1 concurrent build.
Vercel hobby tier: 100 GB bandwidth/month, free for personal/small projects.
Domain registration through Cloudflare Registrar (at-cost): $9.15/year for .com.
Average small US service business website serves under 5,000 monthly visitors, well under any free-tier limit.

Common follow-ups

When should I pay for hosting instead of using a free tier?

When the site has real backend complexity (custom booking, member auth, real-time data), when traffic exceeds the free-tier limits (100K+ visitors/month for Cloudflare), or when you want a single vendor managing hosting + maintenance + small edits as a service. The third case is what Rebuilt Studio Hosted ($9.99/mo) provides.

Are free hosts reliable?

Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and Vercel all run on infrastructure used by Fortune 500 companies. The free tier is not a degraded version, it’s the same network with usage limits. Uptime exceeds what most managed-WordPress hosts deliver at $20–50/month.

Do I need a separate CDN?

No. Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and Vercel all include global CDN by default, pages serve from the data center nearest to each visitor, with full SSL, on every plan including free.

Sources

By Isaiah Grant, Founder, Rebuilt StudioUpdated Apr 27, 2026