What website hosting costs in 2026

What the free plans include

GitHub Pages is free for sites up to 1 GB, with a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB a month. For a static site, those are the limits to compare with what you're planning to publish.

Cloudflare Pages has a free plan with 500 builds a month, 100 custom domains per project and up to 20,000 files per site, so your comparison here includes builds and file count rather than just the size of the site.

Netlify has a $0 free plan with 300 credits a month.

Which limit should you look at? Start with the allowance attached to the service you're considering. A build allowance, a credit allowance and a bandwidth limit aren't interchangeable numbers. Keep them separate when you're comparing the free options.

Free still has limits. But these plans give you options to consider before paying for hosting, particularly if you're looking at a static site rather than choosing a website builder.

A virtual server or a website builder

DigitalOcean's smallest Droplet costs $4 a month. It's a virtual server with 512 MiB memory, 1 vCPU, 10 GiB SSD and 500 GiB transfer. That's the server option in this comparison, rather than a website builder plan.

Wix starts from $17 a month yearly, and Squarespace starts from $19 a month yearly. Both include hosting in the plan price (the yearly billing detail matters when you compare those prices).

There's a different purchase here: with the Droplet, you're choosing a virtual server; with Wix or Squarespace, you're choosing a website builder plan that includes hosting, rather than buying hosting as a separate item.

Don't add hosting again. If you're comparing a builder plan with a server, keep the included hosting in mind instead of treating every price as a charge for the same thing.

Keep the domain separate

Porkbun offers a .com from $11.81 a year, including the ICANN fee, with free WHOIS privacy.

That's a domain price, not a hosting price. Keep it as a separate line in your comparison if you want your own domain, rather than folding it into the monthly hosting figure.

Do you want your own address? That's worth deciding alongside the hosting option. Heya, for example, includes a free yourname.heya.bio address, but it doesn't sell domains. For a custom domain there, you bring one from any registrar, and custom domain support starts on Pro Standard.

Where Heya fits

Heya is our no-code website builder at heya.page. You sign in with Google to publish.

Heya Free costs $0, with no credit card and no time limit. It includes 3 sites, up to 5 pages per site, all 68 templates and a free yourname.heya.bio address with HTTPS, with a small Made with Heya badge on the site.

Pro Lite is $3 a month. You get 3 sites with up to 20 pages per site, the badge is removed, and links are no longer marked nofollow.

Pro Standard is $6 a month, with 5 sites and 1 custom domain per account with HTTPS. Pro Plus is $15 a month, with 25 sites, up to 10 custom domains and the option to download your site as a ZIP of HTML files.

The page limits matter too. Heya allows 40 sections per page, 60 blocks per section and 10 block types. Images can be up to 20 MB. Its 6 embed types are YouTube, Vimeo, Spotify, SoundCloud, Calendly and Google Maps.

For SEO settings, you can add a title of up to 120 characters, a description of up to 300 characters, a favicon and a share image.

And check what you need beyond pages. Heya doesn't have a built-in store, checkout or form builder: you link a button to your checkout or store page, use a Google Form or a Tally form, and use the Calendly embed for bookings.

Related guides: Free website hosting, Domain vs hosting, How much does a website cost? and Best domain registrars.

More from Heya: All guides, Templates and Pricing.