How to choose website hosting
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Hosting comes in three main types. Picking the right one first saves money and moving later.
Static hosting: most marketing sites
If your site is pages, images and scripts (built with a site builder export, a static site generator or a front-end framework), static hosting serves it from a global network, often free for small sites:
| Product | Price today | Free plan | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firebase Hosting | Free plan, then USD 0.15 per GB beyond the free quota | Yes | Pricing |
| Netlify | Free plan, then USD 9 per month | Yes | Pricing |
| Vercel | Free plan, then USD 20 per developer seat per month | Yes | Pricing |
| Render | Free plan, then USD 7 per month | Yes | Pricing |
| Cloudflare Pages | Free | Yes | Pricing |
Prices from vendor websites, checked 2026-10-12; they update automatically.
Compare Vercel vs Netlify and Vercel vs Cloudflare Pages.
Cloud servers: apps and full control
A virtual server runs anything you install, such as WordPress, an API or a background job, for a fixed monthly price:
| Product | Price today | Free plan | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Lightsail | From USD 3.50 per month | No | Pricing |
| DigitalOcean | From USD 4 per month | No | Pricing |
| Vultr | From USD 2.50 per month | No | Pricing |
| Akamai Cloud (Linode) | From USD 5 per month | No | Pricing |
Prices from vendor websites, checked 2026-10-12; they update automatically.
Compare DigitalOcean vs Vultr and DigitalOcean vs AWS Lightsail.
Managed databases
Serverless databases scale with use and start free, so you don't run a database server yourself:
| Product | Price today | Free plan | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| MongoDB Atlas | Free plan, then USD 8 per month (up to USD 30 cap) | Yes | Pricing |
| Turso | Free plan, then USD 4.99 per month | Yes | Pricing |
| Upstash Redis | Free plan, then USD 10 per month | Yes | Pricing |
| Neon | Free plan; USD 0.11 per CU-hour | Yes | Pricing |
| Supabase | Free plan, then USD 25 per month | Yes | Pricing |
Prices from vendor websites, checked 2026-10-12; they update automatically.
Check uptime promises
An uptime guarantee of 99.9% still allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month. Convert any SLA into minutes with the uptime calculator.