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Best options for domain registrar and static site hosting in 2026?
I am helping a small business owner make and host a static website. What are the best options for hosting the site and paying for the domain?
For hosting, I was considering GitHub Pages, since it's free and just built in to GitHub.
For the domain registrar, I see a lot of people on places like Reddit discussing Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare, and Ionos. I was originally considering GoDaddy, but I saw a lot of posts were saying that was the #1 place to avoid. I saw a lot of older posts recommending Google Domains, but I see that has since been killed by Google.
Porkbun is great. Migrated all my domains there from Namecheap a few years ago.
+1 for Porkbun, they sell at close to cost and have a great backend. Stay away from Namecheap and Godaddy, they're well into the enshittification cycle.
+2 for Porkbun. Good customer support too.
+3 for Porkbun, really just a stellar registar.
+4 for Porkbun. I wish they weren't America-based, but they've been excellent for me.
+5 for Porkbun. They have been wonderfully convenient and inexpensive for me for the past several years.
There is also this elephant hunting problem with godaddy. I don’t care he sold the company off to private equity, should tell you what you need to know about the company’s ethical stance.
When you use an SSG and notably don't need PHP, you can't go wrong with Cloudflare. You register the domain at cost, it's got an excellent developer experience, and any and all static hosting is completely free. I use this. I run a web app that compiles to static sites and have over 34 million requests a month, and I haven't paid a single cent, apart from the ten-or so dollars for the domain name.
The only pushback I would give to this answer is to ask yourself whether you're OK with contributing to the problem of the entire internet gradually converging and relying on this single commercial service provider. I mean it's fine if the answer is yes, I just think it's something worth considering before jumping on board.
Well, the other alternative people recommend is Porkbun, which uses Cloudflare for DNS too.
I've used Namecheap and really price was their defining factor for over a decade but now it's comparable to Cloudflare. I was using Google Domains + GitHub Pages until the former got sunset. I transferred my domains to Cloudflare from Squarespace which also allows you to host static pages so it felt like an all-in-one solution. They also have Cloudflare Workers which allow you to host small actual apps and if they're small enough, they're free.
My use-case is having a few vanity domains, one that redirects to my wedding website hosted on Zola, one that masks my GitHub Pages static website, and I also aliased a few e-mail addresses for fun.
After typing this, I know it sounds like a Cloudflare ad, but I generally find it easy to use and the docs for all of the little things they offer for free are pretty good. The UI is modern and it still feels like software that is continuously being updated unlike some of the other registrars.
This is useful for me. I'm trying to figure out where to transfer my domain that ended up in Squarespace's hands, and I forgot about the Cloudflare Workers. That is a cool feature that factors into my decision making.
Yeah, it's a very cool feature. I make changes to my website files on Github and have 11ty talking with Cloudflare to generate the site and upload it. It's very seamless.
I have a small static personal website that I just moved to Cloudflare a month ago (my ISP is migrating out of hosting.) The hosting is free. (I believe they have limits on file size more than total site size.) My site has .com and .net domains. The .com is with Namecheap and the .net was with the ISP. I made Cloudflare the registrar for the .net and their renewal price is less than $12/ year, which is several bucks cheaper than Namecheap for the .com domain. I'm tempted to move the .com as well, but part of my brain says not to put all my eggs in a Cloudflare basket. At the same time, it's a small, static personal website, and if it goes down for a few days, not even I will care that much.
I use namecheap. It works. I barely interact with it, it's not like you need your domain registrar to do all that much.
Porkbun is what all of my friends recommend and they like it.
Personally, I’ve been using Hover/Tucows for like 15 years and never had an issue. The one time I contacted them, it took three rings for a real person to answer the phone.
Wow I wouldn't have guessed tucows was still around, they're from the early internet. I see they still inexplicably charge twice as much as they need to for domains :) To be fair, it used to be more like 4x.
My tired brain looked at that and processed it as "Hawk Tuah"
Please send help
Re. registrar, I use CanSpace and they've been drama-free (and cheap for .ca domains) for a couple years. Namecheap was fine before that.
I have my site on Bunny.net, a European alternative to Cloudflare. And they're awesome! They don't have a free option like Cloudflare, but I currently pay €1/month for all my hosting, CDN and DNS.
I host my blog on Codeberg pre build, and just have an action setup to push the built files to Bunny on change.
Interesting, I'm going to look into Bunny.net. Seems I could easily host all my static site stuff there and because it uses so little storage and bandwidth I could probably host all my static sites for the $1/month. Also seems pricing for adding on other options and such is relatively inexpensive.
I'm on the Netlify free tier currently but have been eyeing moving to something else. Inexpensive but far more flexible is nice. Appears on Bunny it's possible to set up edge rules that can catch/block scrapers and such too. I do want to avoid having tons of unnecessary extra AI scraper traffic if possible. Thankfully I have very little for them to scrape, but if I do eventually want to have pages with lots of images/etc I want to avoid wasteful scraper bandwidth hogging
Might also consider Mythic Beasts or Neocities or something else. I'm just not sure yet. I just want to keep hosting some very small size static sites for as close to $0 as possible while having some flexibility
Speaking of European, I’ve been with very content with Ionos for domain, web hosting (both via provided hosting and simply a bare VPS), as well as email, actually.
Thanks everyone for your replies! We'll be trying Porkbun for the domain registrar. For the static hosting, we'll try GitHub but keep some of the other options in mind.
GitHub does have its fair share of issues lately. It is still an option but for business I'd always ask myself if you really want to go for a free option.
Old fashioned webhosting is still a thing and doesn't have to be expensive either. For example Hetzner has an offering that starts at $2 per month. They also do offer domain registration if you want to combine it into one package.
Porkbun which is mentioned by a bunch of others for the domain has a similar static website offering.
Also, have you taken email into account? I assume the owner might want to receive mail for the domain so you'd want to do some mailhosting. Hetzner provides mail hosting in their offering (though I don't know about the quality).
Domain registrar netim
Static site host vercel or github
Another +1 here for Porkbun for domains. Moved from Hover to Porkbun to save money a long time ago and never looked back. Very inexpensive. UI is great for DNS and making adjustments. All very simple and easy. Porkbun emails way ahead of time when domains are going to renew. Often has sales on the first year for new domains. Fast/efficient site and everything. No BS, no dark patterns, no marketing layers to dig through to just order what you want.
Currently statically host everything on the free tier of Netlify. Might change that at some point, but for my purposes it's fine for now
Personally I'm NameCheap and GitLab pages here. NameCheap is fine (and has .ca) and GitLab pages is free.
I use Mythic Beasts for my domains because they're independent and run by some awfully technical chaps. And of course their name is metal as hell. Has worked well with my GitHub Pages static site for years now (note the occasional unicorn pages due to Microsoft's shitty Azure infra), I increasing loathe MS and GitHub behaviour but it's free and more reliant than me self-hosting.
A couple of years ago I set up dynamic dns for my personal vpn and the Mythic Beasts APIs and docs made it very easy (literally just a cron job and a bash script, it worked the very first time I tested it!). Ditto for setting up some subdomains for setting up https certs for my locally-hosted services (jellyfin, rss, etc) on my home network (that I use the vpn to access securely). Prices are a smidge higher than most registrars but still less than $20 a year, and it's comforting to know I'm supporting a company comprised of humans, not ghoulish creatures wearing human skins who worship the dollar and VC.
i’ve been with porkbun since they launched and they’ve always been good. for hosting simple pages, i like cloidflare pages. github is also great.
you can also get the free oracle deal and spend your life navigating their insane panel. it’s a good deal — i think it’s at 12gb ram, 200gb storage, 4 cores to spread out.
I run my personal blog on Cloudflare's Workers thing. It's a fairly simple Jekyll blog. Unlike GitHub Pages + Jekyll integration, Cloudflare doesn't limit Jekyll plugins and features. It's been a pleasure.
I use NordName. They're a small Finnish company but they seem to work well. I initially moved to them because, despite being American, I don't really went to rely on American tech, but most of the European registrars I found charged for domain privacy.
I don’t know if this qualifies for what you’re after but I’m using Hover. It was easy to setup and trouble free for a few years since I signed up. But my use case is very basic. I just redirect a .ca domain name to a blog.
Is it realistic to self host these days? Just wondering because I have a few old dell power edges and they are gathering dust