If you search for web hosting advice, you'll find endless opinions. Some people say free hosting is fine; others insist you need a paid VPS from day one. The truth, as usual, depends entirely on what you're building. Here's the genuinely honest breakdown.
When Free Hosting is Absolutely Fine
Free hosting platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages are not "cheap" in the traditional sense — they're built on enterprise infrastructure and serve real production traffic for millions of websites. Free works perfectly for:
- ▸Personal portfolios and CVs: Low traffic, static content — free hosting handles this with ease
- ▸Side projects and experiments: If nobody's paying to use it, you shouldn't be paying to run it
- ▸Open-source project docs: GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages are perfect here
- ▸Landing pages: Marketing sites with occasional traffic spikes are exactly what CDN-based free hosting handles best
- ▸Student projects: Learning to code doesn't require spending money on hosting
The Real Limitations of Free Hosting
- ▸No server-side processing: Free static hosting can't run a database, process payments, or handle user authentication natively
- ▸Bandwidth limits: Most free tiers cap at 100GB/month — fine for most sites, a problem for media-heavy or popular ones
- ▸No SLA: Free plans don't come with uptime guarantees. If Vercel has an outage, you have no recourse.
- ▸Commercial restrictions: Vercel's free plan explicitly prohibits commercial use
- ▸Cold starts: Serverless functions on free tiers may have latency spikes after inactivity
When to Pay for Hosting
The transition from free to paid makes sense when:
- ▸You're making money from the project: If users are paying, you should pay for reliable infrastructure
- ▸You need a database: Any serious app needs persistent server-side storage
- ▸Traffic exceeds free tier limits: Consistent traffic over 100GB/month means you need to upgrade
- ▸Uptime matters: If people's workflows depend on your service being up, you need an SLA
- ▸You need SSH access: For debugging, custom software, or complex setups, a VPS is necessary
The Budget-Conscious Paid Options
Paid doesn't have to mean expensive. Some genuinely affordable options:
- ▸Hetzner CX22: ~£4/month for a 2-core, 4GB RAM VPS in Europe. Excellent value.
- ▸DigitalOcean Droplet: $6/month for a basic VPS. Good documentation, great for beginners.
- ▸Vercel Pro: $20/month — removes commercial restrictions and raises limits significantly
- ▸Railway: Pay-as-you-go, usually $5-20/month for small apps with a database
Note: A £4/month VPS from Hetzner is more powerful than most shared hosting plans that cost £8-15/month. If you're comfortable with Linux, a VPS is almost always the better value at any price point.
The Hybrid Approach (What Most Professionals Do)
Most experienced developers use a hybrid approach:
- ▸Static front-end on Cloudflare Pages or Vercel (free)
- ▸Backend API on a small VPS or Railway (cheap paid)
- ▸Database on managed service or the same VPS
- ▸CDN via Cloudflare (free)
💡 Tip: This hybrid approach gives you the speed and simplicity of CDN-hosted frontend with the flexibility of a real backend server, typically for under £10/month total.