Hosting and domain questions, answered

For a static site, which covers most portfolios, landing pages and small business sites, use GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages or Workers, Netlify or Vercel. All four host for free with HTTPS and let you connect your own domain. Read the rules first: Vercel's free Hobby plan and GitHub Pages are not for commercial use, and Netlify's free plan pauses sites when its monthly credits run out.

Pick an email provider, add your domain in its admin panel, then add the DNS records it gives you at your registrar: MX records to receive mail, plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC records so your messages are trusted. For free, Cloudflare Email Routing forwards [email protected] to your existing inbox, and Zoho Mail's free plan hosts up to five mailboxes. For a full business setup, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 charge per user.

Choose Vercel for Next.js and apps that need server features, especially if you will pay for Pro, since its free Hobby plan is non-commercial only. Choose Netlify for static and Jamstack sites that want built-in forms and a free plan you can use for a small business, keeping in mind that it pauses sites when the 300 monthly credits run out. Both are excellent; the free-plan rules decide it for most people.

Buy from a registrar with honest renewal prices and free privacy: Cloudflare Registrar charges what the registry charges with no markup, and Namecheap and Porkbun are popular low-cost options with free WHOIS privacy. Avoid choosing on a $1 first-year deal; renewal is what you pay every year after. A .com's wholesale fee rises to $10.97 on November 1, 2026, so a fair price is a little above that.

Cloudflare is usually cheaper over time because it sells domains at cost with no markup, but every domain must use Cloudflare's nameservers. Namecheap costs a little more on renewal, supports more extensions and lets you use any DNS provider, with free lifetime privacy. If you are happy on Cloudflare DNS, choose Cloudflare. If you need other nameservers or an extension Cloudflare does not sell, choose Namecheap.

Push your site's code to a GitHub repository, import it into a host such as Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare, and let the host build and publish it to a free URL. Then add your domain in the host's settings and copy the DNS records it gives you to your registrar. Plain HTML can even be dragged into Netlify's dashboard. After that, every push to GitHub redeploys automatically.

In your Vercel project, open Settings, then Domains, and add your domain. Vercel then shows the records to add at your DNS provider: an A record for the root domain (Vercel's general value is 76.76.21.21, but use the value on your domain card) and a CNAME for subdomains such as www. Alternatively, switch your nameservers to Vercel. Once the records propagate, Vercel issues HTTPS automatically.

Yes. A domain is only the address people type; hosting is the computer that stores your site and sends it to visitors. Without hosting, your domain shows a parking page or nothing. The good news: website builders include hosting, static sites can be hosted free, and you connect the domain to the host by changing a couple of DNS records at your registrar.