compute
comparison
05 Sept 2026
Five hosts for a small site, compared on the limit that stops you first
None of these run out of bandwidth. They stop on a build quota, a plan migration you cannot undo, a Git permission, or a clause saying your site is the wrong kind of site.
By Purvansh Parmar
Checked 2026-09-05
Read 8 min
Entries 5
Bandwidth stopped being the interesting number years ago. A static site with a few thousand visitors a month costs any of these companies almost nothing to serve, and they all know it.
What they meter instead is the expensive part: builds, function invocations, and the risk that you are a business using a plan meant for a hobby. Every entry below is a limit I could confirm on 5 September 2026, and in three cases the one that bites has nothing to do with how popular your site is.
How this was checkedI deployed this site eight times in one afternoon while adding a database to it, and the free tier stopped me twice for reasons that had nothing to do with traffic. Netlify would not attach its Postgres product without migrating the account to a credit-based plan first, with a checkbox confirming the move cannot be reversed. Two builds later, secret scanning failed the build because a project URL appeared in a README, which is a rule I would keep and had to work around anyway.
What I compared on
- the first limit a small site actually reaches
- what the free tier costs you in flexibility rather than in money
- what the cheapest paid step is, and what it unlocks
- whether the terms permit what you are building
Git-driven deploys with functions, forms and redirects in the same box.
Free
300 credits a month, unlimited deploy previews, functions included. Credits meter builds and function use together rather than capping each separately.
Paid
Personal is 9 dollars a month for 1,000 credits, and adds secret detection and one day of observability.
Wins
The build pipeline is the most complete here. Forms without a backend, redirects and rewrites in a text file, and secret scanning that reads the build output rather than only the source, which caught a value of mine that source-only scanning would have missed.
Loses
Attaching its Postgres product requires migrating to a credit-based plan, and the dialog states you cannot switch back. That is a one-way change to how the whole account is billed, offered in exchange for a database on a free tier, adn the irreversibility is the price rather than the money.
300 credits free$9/mo for 1,000one-way plan migration
Static hosting on the edge network, with Workers for anything dynamic.
Free
500 builds a month, one at a time, 20,000 files per site and 100 custom domains. Workers add 100,000 requests a day with 10 milliseconds of CPU per invocation.
Paid
Workers Paid is 5 dollars a month for 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds, and lifts the per-invocation ceiling from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.
Wins
The cheapest paid step of the five, and the 10 millisecond free CPU budget is more generous than it sounds because it counts CPU rather than wall clock, so waiting on a database costs nothing.
Loses
One concurrent build. Push twice in a minute and the second waits, which is invisible on a hobby project and painful the moment two people share a repository. The 20,000 file ceiling also catches image-heavy static sites earlier than you would guess.
500 builds/mo1 concurrent build100k req/day$5/mo
The Next.js host, with the tightest framework integration of the group.
Free
Hobby allows 100 deployments an hour, 45 minutes of build time per deployment, and runtime logs kept for one hour.
Paid
Pro lifts the log retention and the transfer allowance, and adds team features the free plan structurally cannot have.
Wins
Nothing else deploys a Next.js app with as little thought, and 45 minutes of build time per deployment is the most generous single-build budget here by a wide margin.
Loses
A Hobby team cannot connect to a repository owned by a Git organisation. Not a soft limit, a structural one: move your repo into an org for any reason and the free plan stops being an option that afternoon. Function duration also defaults to 10 seconds and caps at 60.
100 builds/hour45 min build10s default, 60s maxno org repos
Static files served from a repository, with no build platform of its own beyond Jekyll and Actions.
Free
Sites up to 1 GB, a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB a month, and a soft limit of 10 builds an hour. There is no paid tier because there is no product to upgrade.
Paid
None. Paying GitHub for Actions minutes speeds your build, but Pages itself has no plan above free.
Wins
It is already there, it costs nothing, and the soft limits are genuinely soft. For documentation next to the code it documents, nothing else has less to set up or fewer moving parts to break.
Loses
The terms forbid running a business on it. E-commerce, commercial software as a service and transactions involving credit card numbers are all named as prohibited, so the limit that stops you is written in policy and not in a quota you can watch.
1 GB site100 GB/mo soft10 builds/hourno commercial use
05 A virtual machine you rent
One small instance, a web server, and a certificate you renew yourself.
Free
Nothing is free, though the always-free tiers at the larger clouds cover a small instance indefinitely if you can tolerate the region and the terms.
Paid
Roughly 4 to 6 dollars a month buys a shared vCPU instance at most providers, with no build quota, no invocation limit, and no acceptable use policy about commerce.
Wins
No limit is imposed on the shape of what you build. This site's own database runs on a box like this, and I ran a dependency install on it in 24 seconds that had taken over twenty minutes across a network filesystem.
Loses
Everything the others do for you is now yours: certificates, updates, the reverse proxy, and being the person who finds out at midnight. There is no atomic deploy and no automatic rollback unless you build both.
$4 to $6/mo24s install0 build quotas
Side by side
| Host | First real limit | Free | Cheapest paid |
|---|
| Netlify | database needs a one-way plan change | 300 credits/mo | $9/mo |
| Cloudflare | 1 concurrent build | 500 builds/mo | $5/mo |
| Vercel | no Git organisation repos | 100 builds/hour | Pro |
| GitHub Pages | commercial use prohibited | 1 GB, 100 GB/mo | none |
| Rented VM | you are the operations team | none | $4 to $6/mo |
Verdict
Cloudflare Pages and Workers, for most small sites. Five dollars is the cheapest exit from a free tier here, the request allowance is the most generous, and no limit in it depends on who owns your repository or what your site sells. Stay on Netlify if you use the forms and redirects seriously, as this site does, but treat the credit migration as a decision rather than a checkbox. Use GitHub Pages for docs and nothing that takes money. And rent a machine the moment your problem is a build quota, because that is the one thing none of these plans sell you more of cheaply.
Sources