Free Static Site Hosting Compared: Cloudflare Pages vs GitHub Pages vs Vercel vs Netlify

TL;DR: For a personal static site targeting a global audience, Cloudflare Pages is the strongest default — unlimited free bandwidth and the best worldwide latency. GitHub Pages is the simplest if your repo already lives on GitHub. Vercel is the smoothest Next.js experience, and Netlify lands somewhere in the middle with the most polished preview workflows. All four are genuinely free for a blog like this one.

"Free hosting" used to mean a banner ad at the top of your GeoCities page. Today the free tiers of the big static hosts are, frankly, absurdly good — they exist because a hobbyist today is a startup founder tomorrow. Here's how the four majors compare for a real personal site in 2026.

The contenders#

Cloudflare Pages#

• Free tier: unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month, unlimited sites
• Speed: the whole point — Cloudflare's network peers with essentially every ISP on earth
• Workflow: connect a GitHub repo, build command npm run build, output directory out
• Catch: build minutes are shared across your projects; heavy monorepos can hit the cap

Best for: sites with a global audience. If your readers are spread across continents, nothing else on this list matches the latency, and the missing bandwidth ceiling means a Hacker News front-page moment costs you nothing.

GitHub Pages#

• Free tier: 100GB soft bandwidth/month, 1GB repo size, unlimited public repos
• Speed: backed by Fastly's CDN — genuinely fast, just slightly thinner edge coverage than Cloudflare
• Workflow: a ready-made GitHub Actions workflow pushes your out/ folder on every commit
• Catch: the 1GB repo limit means large image galleries belong in Git LFS or elsewhere

Best for: developer blogs that live next to the code. One platform, one bill (zero), and username.github.io is a domain people actually recognize as yours.

Vercel#

• Free tier: 100GB bandwidth/month, generous build allowance for personal use
• Speed: excellent, with smart edge caching
• Workflow: zero-config for Next.js — push and it deploys, previews per PR
• Catch: the hobby tier is for non-commercial use; businesses are expected to move to the $20/seat plan

Best for: Next.js apps that use server features (ISR, functions, image optimization). For a purely static export it works fine too — you just aren't using most of what Vercel is selling.

Netlify#

• Free tier: 100GB bandwidth/month, 300 build minutes
• Speed: solid global CDN
• Workflow: drag-and-drop deploys, per-PR preview links, lots of little conveniences
• Catch: 300 build minutes vanish surprisingly fast if you rebuild on every image commit

Best for: people who love the preview-URL workflow or want one-click rollbacks without touching a terminal.

Head-to-head#

	Cloudflare Pages	GitHub Pages	Vercel	Netlify
Free bandwidth	Unlimited	100GB/mo	100GB/mo	100GB/mo
Free builds	500/mo	via Actions	generous	300 min/mo
Global latency	Best	Great	Great	Great
Setup effort	Low	Medium	Lowest	Low
Free subdomain	.pages.dev	.github.io	.vercel.app	.netlify.app
Commercial use	Allowed	Allowed	Hobby only	Allowed

My recommendation#

1. Default choice: Cloudflare Pages. Unlimited bandwidth plus the widest edge network is hard to argue with for an international audience.
2. If your site lives beside its code: GitHub Pages. The Actions workflow is a solved problem and the mental overhead is zero.
3. If you might grow beyond static: Vercel. Starting static and adding server features later is a five-line change.

One last note: whichever you choose, put your content in Markdown in a git repo, as this site does. Hosts come and go; a folder of plain-text files is forever.