You don’t need to pay for hosting a simple website anymore

A few months ago, I finally completed work on my RTL-GPS GNSS hobby application, which I intended to make open-source. The application comes with its fair share of documentation, so I needed somewhere to deliver those files online. All that was really needed was a basic site with a landing page and some setup notes online.

Normally, I would have treated that like a normal hosting job. Buy some cheap cPanel hosting or a VPS, point a domain at it, maybe install WordPress if I feel like being fancy, and try to remember to maintain it.

But that just felt ridiculous for a handful of static HTML and PDF files.

So, I bought a domain name for $1 and tried hosting the entire site for free on Cloudflare Pages instead. In the end, the domain was the only thing I actually paid for. The website itself costs absolutely nothing to host, comes with TLS, and is protected by Cloudflare’s proxied connection.

Cloudflare Pages let me skip the hosting hassle and cost

No cPanel, no FTP, no endless configuration, no monthly invoices

Getting the RTL-GPS website done was the hardest part, but once it was complete, hosting it on Cloudflare was really simple. I bought the rtl-gps.online domain from a domain registrar and changed the nameservers at my registrar to the ones given to me by Cloudflare when I connected the new domain to Cloudflare.

This was just a matter of changing the original registrar’s nameservers to:

• evelyn.ns.cloudflare.com
• jobs.ns.cloudflare.com

While I waited patiently for Cloudflare to propagate the changes and import the existing DNS records, I made sure my website files were clean and organized and prepared correctly for upload to Cloudflare Pages. The important part was making sure the index.html page was in the root directory, because that is the page Cloudflare serves first. My folder structure looked like this:

rtl-gps-site/

index.html

getting-started.html

hardware-notes.html

downloads.html

404.html

style.css

images/

docs/

rtl-gps-quick-start.pdf

Rtl-gps-hardware-notes.pdf

After confirming the file and folder structure worked locally, I received a confirmation email that the Cloudflare nameservers were now serving the domain, and started creating the Cloudflare Pages.

Finding the exact location in the Cloudflare dashboard was tricky, but I found it under Build -> Compute -> Workers & Pages. Cloudflare naming can get a bit weird here, as you’re technically creating a “worker application,” and not a static site.

After creating the application and selecting “Upload your static files,” it was just a matter of uploading the site root directory, naming the application “rtl-sdr-prod”, and setting read-only worker custom domain records:

• rtl-gps.online WORKER record > rtl-sdr-prod
• www.rtl-gps.online WORKER record > rtl-sdr-prod

After saving the changes, Cloudflare Pages handled the DNS records, the HTTPS certificate, and the website was up and running within a few minutes. Compared to rolling out a VPS and taking on the security risk, or configuring cPanel, the Cloudflare Pages process was much easier, simpler, and best of all, completely cost-free.

The only thing I paid for was the domain

In 2026, it’s hard to imagine you could host a website for free, but Cloudflare Pages made it happen

Before discovering Cloudflare Pages, even hosting a tiny website like mine would still incur a monthly fee and require maintenance and backup. But this project only cost me $1, and that cost was for the domain name itself.

Typically, a free-forever, or free tier, comes with a lot of limitations, but Cloudflare Pages gave me some impressive hosting capabilities:

• Up to 20,000 files
• 100 custom domains per project
• 500 deployments/builds per month
• Individual files can be up to 25Mb each.

These specs easily covered my HTML pages, images, and small PDF downloads. I used the dashboard upload, but I also discovered that static page applications support connecting to GitHub, meaning I could make commits, upload via the Windows 11 GitHub application, and keep everything tidy in the future.

Compare that with the typical hosting options. Shared hosting means yet another account and renewal date. A VPS could have given me more control, but I would have been responsible for updating it, applying security patches, and fixing anything that breaks during the installation of web services. WordPress hosting was an option, too, but creating a page, database, and CSS files for a simple website definitely seemed like overkill.

I have already run enough web-facing services to know that spinning up yet another server is never as simple as it sounds, and would just add more cost to what was a simple project. In the end, and for this project, a paid hosting service wouldn’t have actually given me anything extra I needed.

It still feels like a real website

A custom domain, HTTPS, downloads, and even a few error pages made it feel real (because it is)

The finished website didn’t feel like a compromise. It used a real domain name, loaded over HTTPS, had a TLS edge certificate from Cloudflare, and had real DDoS and DoS protection thanks to Cloudflare’s proxying.

Cloudflare also lets you serve a 404.html error page, and I included one along with the rest of the site because it made everything complete. Rather than being stuck with a 404 page served by the web server, I made mine with the same style as the rest of the site and included helpful links to get visitors back on track. A small, but really nice touch for a free service.

I also discovered, after playing around with Cloudflare Workers and Pages, that if I needed it, I had room to grow. Cloudflare pages can do a bit more than just serve HTML pages. They can add limited server-side functionality, such as form handling, authentication, and middleware, and even support a small API without running a dedicated server.

Cloudflare also has Turnstile, its answer to Google’s reCAPTCHA, which is far less annoying for anyone on a VPN or shared IP address. Not that I needed any of that for my project website, but it was nice to know the functionality exists if I need it later.

The catch is also the point

Static hosting can’t replace dynamic pages and server-side processing, but that’s also what makes it useful

Cloudflare’s Pages are static hosting, so they’re not a replacement for every type of web hosting platform. If I needed to add user accounts, a database or two, a dynamic dashboard, uptime robots, or anything that demands persistent server-side logic, static hosting just doesn’t cut it.

That’s just an honest limitation, but it’s also why I liked it so much. A simple static site has way fewer moving parts that can break and take everything down with them. There are no WordPress plugins to patch, no server packages to break PHP, and no vibe-coded web apps sitting there waiting to be exploited. If something goes wrong, I can just redeploy the whole site by reverting to a previous deployment or by reuploading the folder.

For my kind of website, simplicity is the main benefit. My project landing page didn’t need a backend, so the smartest (and cheapest) hosting option was the one that required far less maintenance.

I’d definitely use this again for small projects

But I’m not canceling every hosting server I use just yet

After using Cloudflare Pages, I’m definitely considering migrating a few of my paid-hosted websites, just because the price is right for what I need. The project site for RTL-GPS was a great reminder that for websites that are basically just public folders (with pretty styling), static hosting is probably all I really need.

I would use this setup again for personal portfolios, project documentation, or as a link-and-download hub. Anything that just needs a place to park HTML, text, images, and files can definitely benefit from Cloudflare Pages.

Cloudflare Pages’ big appeal is that it replaced paid hosting services that, in hindsight, I never really needed to pay for in the first place. That said, other projects of mine that did need dynamic pages and server-side processing can’t really have a home on Cloudflare.

Ultimately, for this site, where the domain cost only $1 and hosting was free, the only regret I really had was that I hadn’t found it sooner.