Free website hosting: alternatives to GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Pages compared. The limits of each free plan, what they will not let you do and how to put your own name on the site.

Reviewed 2026-10-22

For a static site (A portfolio or a project demo) several services will host it for free. They differ in their limits and in what they let you do, and below are the limits each one publishes as of October 2026.

Before you choose

All of these host static sites, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images. Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare also run small functions, but none of them gives you a server with PHP and a database.

Since they all cost zero on the free plan, look at three other things, whether commercial use is allowed, what happens when you go over the limit and which address you get.

GitHub Pages

It publishes the site straight from a repository, and the address will be username.github.io. On a free account the repository has to be public. To publish from a private one you need a paid GitHub plan.

The site can be up to 1 GB and has a soft limit of 100 GB of traffic a month. GitHub says plainly that it is not free hosting for businesses, online shops or SaaS products.

Netlify and Vercel

Netlify runs on credits. The free plan comes with 300 a month, each GB of traffic uses 20 and each production deploy 15. When they run out, your projects will be paused until the next month.

Vercel gives 100 GB of traffic a month on its Hobby plan, but only for personal, non-commercial use. If you go over a limit, you will have to wait up to 30 days to use it again.

Both build your project on every push, with your npm run build. GitHub Pages only does that with Jekyll or with a GitHub Action you write yourself.

Cloudflare Pages

It does not charge for the traffic of a static site. The free plan allows 500 builds a month, 20,000 files per site and 25 MiB per file.

The dashboard is built for people who already use Cloudflare, and the address you get will be project.pages.dev.

Your name, wherever the site lives

None of these services gives you an address with your name without buying a domain. With the does.software free plan you get yourname.does.software and redirect it to your site, wherever it is. If you switch hosting one day, you change the target and the link on your CV will keep working.

You can also host the site here. That is not free, it comes with the Starter plan (From €2.56/month) or with the 14-day trial, with 100MB per site and deploys from GitHub or GitLab. Nothing is built here, you upload the build output. The GitHub guide walks you through it.

For a personal site, GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages are free for real. Netlify and Vercel build for you, but check their limits before you pick them. Your name goes on top with a redirect, wherever the site lives.

Claim your name Or back to Static sites

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