Static Site Hosting

Static site hosting has converged on a model that was genuinely new five years ago and is now the obvious default for most content-led projects: you push a commit, a build pipeline compiles your site, and the output is distributed to edge nodes globally. No server to patch, no PHP to misconfigure, no database to back up. The hosting is near-free at low traffic volumes and the performance baseline — a pre-built HTML file served from an edge node geographically close to the visitor — is better than most dynamically rendered sites regardless of their infrastructure spend. The real differences between Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare Pages are at the edges: how their free tiers are constrained, what the deploy pipeline ergonomics look like, and what happens when you need more than static files.

Netlify was the category pioneer and still has the broadest ecosystem for static and Jamstack sites. The free tier gives you 300 build minutes per month, 100GB of bandwidth, and continuous deployment from Git — GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket all supported. Form handling, identity (basic auth), and serverless functions are included in the free tier with usage caps. The deploy preview feature, which creates a unique URL for every pull request, is genuinely useful for collaborative workflows and has been copied by every competitor. Netlify’s edge functions run on a Deno-based runtime and are available on free plans, which is a meaningful differentiator for projects that need light compute at the edge. The weakness of Netlify’s free tier is that the bandwidth cap (100GB/month) is easy to blow through on a media-heavy site that gets real traffic, and the paid plans jump to $19/month per seat — the pricing model is per-member rather than per-site, which is unintuitive for agency or collaborative use.

Vercel was built specifically around Next.js — the Vercel team maintains Next.js — and is the natural choice for any project in that framework. For non-Next.js static sites it still works well, and the deploy pipeline is polished across Hugo, Astro, SvelteKit, and others. The free tier matches Netlify on bandwidth (100GB) and is more generous on build time. Vercel’s edge functions run on its own V8-based Edge Runtime, which is faster cold-start than a full serverless function and tightly integrated with Next.js middleware. The image optimisation built into Vercel’s hosting is particularly strong — automatic format conversion, responsive srcsets, and AVIF/WebP output without configuration. The trade-off is vendor coupling: if you are running Next.js, Vercel is the reference platform and that is a dependency worth knowing about; some Next.js features either require Vercel or need extra configuration elsewhere.

Cloudflare Pages sits within the broader Cloudflare platform and is the most generous free tier of the three: unlimited bandwidth on the free plan, which is the practical differentiator for sites with real traffic. Build minutes are capped at 500/month, which is sufficient for most projects. Pages deploys to Cloudflare’s global network — 300+ edge nodes — which gives it the best geographic distribution of the three. Cloudflare Workers (edge compute) integration is native, and if you are already using Cloudflare for DNS or CDN the Pages deployment is a natural extension rather than a separate product relationship. The deploy pipeline supports the main static frameworks well; the configuration surface is slightly less polished than Netlify or Vercel for complex build setups, and the community ecosystem of plugins and integrations is smaller. The wholesale-cost domain registration and the zero-bandwidth-cost free tier make Cloudflare Pages the most economical choice for sites that have traffic and want to stay on the free plan.

When to pick what: Netlify is the best default for Jamstack projects that need rich edge functionality, form handling, or identity out of the box — the ecosystem depth is still unmatched. Vercel is the correct choice for Next.js projects and for any team investing seriously in that framework. Cloudflare Pages is the right call when bandwidth cost is a concern, when you are already inside the Cloudflare ecosystem, or when geographic distribution to a global audience matters most.