Cheap static website hosting

Cheap should mean honest numbers, not a trap. SiteHost publishes concrete prices: Starter $9, Pro $30, Scale $65, Business $130. This guide compares what free hosts cost you in time, avoids unlimited claims, and shows a résumé-scale example.

Price board without fog

Starter is $9/mo for 1 site and 2 GB. Pro is $30/mo for 3 sites, 10 GB, and staging. Scale is $65/mo. Business is $130/mo when teams and larger site counts matter. The trial lasts about a day; then you pay. There is no forever-free plan, no website builder, no cPanel, no email hosting, and no built-in CDN. Match storage to compressed media. Climb tiers when site count or teamwork demands it — not for vibes.

What free hosts charge in time

Staging on Pro helps when you maintain more than one experiment. Starter remains enough for many single properties.

Treat dated zips as your memory. Labels beat heroic recalls after a bad publish. Rollback is there, but only if you know which artifact was good.

Third-party embeds — forms, booking, donate widgets — fail independently of hosting. Check vendor status before republishing identical files.

No unlimited stories

On SiteHost, cheap static website hosting still reduces to files moving through a calm pipeline. People complicate it with server shopping. Resist that urge when your pages already exist as HTML.

Third-party embeds — forms, booking, donate widgets — fail independently of hosting. Check vendor status before republishing identical files.

Custom domains live at registrars. Transfer is optional; pointing records is enough. Do not tangle mail DNS with website DNS casually.

Résumé example on Starter

A job seeker compares free tiers to Starter at $9, publishes a résumé, and avoids rewriting absolute URLs before HTTPS on the domain exists.

Migration URL mistakes

Custom domains live at registrars. Transfer is optional; pointing records is enough. Do not tangle mail DNS with website DNS casually.

On SiteHost, cheap static website hosting still reduces to files moving through a calm pipeline. People complicate it with server shopping. Resist that urge when your pages already exist as HTML.

Phone testing is not optional. Wide monitors hide sticky-header bugs and oversized heroes. Open preview on cellular once per meaningful release.

Choosing a tier

Cheap versus costly surprises

WordPress URLs before HTTPS

Search-replace tools and old WordPress habits push people to rewrite every link to https://yourdomain.com before DNS points and before a certificate exists on the new host. Absolute HTTPS links then fail in confusing ways; redirects loop; assets 404. A cheap migration script rewrote links before the $9 host had a domain cert. Even when your new site is plain static HTML, prefer relative links for your own files and treat HTTPS preview as canonical until SiteHost verifies DNS and issues the domain certificate. If you still run WordPress elsewhere, do not flip its site URL settings until HTTPS on the destination is real.

One more practical note on cheap static website hosting

Keep the scope of cheap static website hosting aligned with what SiteHost actually sells: static file hosting with immediate HTTPS preview and custom-domain certificates after DNS verifies. The worked reality for this article is a job seeker compares free tiers to starter at $9, publishes a résumé, and avoids rewriting absolute urls before https on the domain exists. When someone tries to expand the project into server management, a website builder you do not have, or email inboxes on the same SKU, pause and separate products. Write down the public URL only after it is a domain you control. Keep a prior zip. Click the phone number or primary button yourself on preview. Related reading: static website hosting with free ssl, website hosting for freelancers, and cheap html website hosting. If storage pressure appears, compress media before you climb from Starter to Pro; if site count grows, Pro’s three sites and staging are the usual next step; Scale and Business wait for larger portfolios and teams. That is the whole economics story without unlimited fairy tales.

Field notes you can reuse next month

Create a simple folder on your computer named for the site and the month. Drop every zip you publish into it. When a stakeholder asks what changed, open the folder instead of reconstructing history from memory. If you work with a designer, agree that they deliver archives that extract to index.html at the root. If you work with a developer who loves client-side routers, agree on real files for public URLs before anyone prints QR codes. If you are cost-sensitive, revisit whether you still need Pro’s staging or whether Starter covers the live property alone. If you are security-sensitive, re-scan your HTML for http:// after each vendor gives you a new embed snippet. If you are speed-sensitive, weigh images on a scale that is not a marketing graph — look at file sizes on disk. These notes are not glamorous. They are how static sites stay calm on SiteHost without cPanel, without a website builder, and without pretending email was included.

Questions people actually ask

Is $9 actually cheap?

For a stable custom domain site with HTTPS preview and rollback, yes compared with the time free tiers often consume.

Why not unlimited storage?

Unlimited claims hide soft limits. SiteHost states 2 GB on Starter and higher numbers on Pro, Scale, and Business.

Can I stay on trial forever?

No. The trial is about a day.

Do I need Pro for a résumé?

Usually not. Starter fits one small site.