Web hosting — going static with Netlify

Keeping up with the cost of “cheap web hosting” can be surprisingly difficult on a student budget. By the end of 2018, the WordPress site was taken down due to those costs and replaced with a simple static site that looked more like a CV. In 2019, Netlify entered the picture, and a blog went live using one of the provided sample templates. Then life got busy, and the site sat untouched for the next couple of years.

Here’s the core difference between traditional web hosting and static hosting. Think of a webpage as a block of data. In the conventional approach, a computer is rented, the data is stored on that computer’s disk, and a program runs on that computer to serve that data. In Netlify’s case, content is distributed so multiple people can access it through the network from their own devices simultaneously.

Shared hosting typically shares CPU, RAM, and disk across customers. In contrast, Netlify primarily serves static assets from a global CDN (a CDN is included even on the free plan, and higher tiers offer more). This model enables free hosting with excellent performance because operational costs are low. Since static hosting is served over a CDN, performance tends to be excellent.

Considering there’s no computing time when the browser hits the CDN servers, your site’s Time to First Byte will be very short, regardless of the geographic location.

The catch is that server-rendered websites can’t be hosted as-is. Frameworks like WordPress don’t run directly on Netlify (although a static site that pulls content over the WP REST API can work). If server-side compute or a database is required, Netlify provides options like functions and integrations even on the free plan—but it needs to be built differently than a traditional PHP setup.

TL;DR

This could go deeper, but that would take a whole article on its own. Here are some reasons Netlify is a solid option:

• It’s free
• Easy to use
• Deploy in seconds
• Continuous Deployment (CD)
• Branch Deploys
• Free Private Repo Hosting
• Deploy Previews
• Asset Optimization
• Free SSL
• Rewrites and Redirects
• Custom Subdomains
• Free DNS

Check out Netlify if taking the static web hosting route is appealing. Next up: building the static site.