How to Set Up a Website for Free in 2026

The good news: it has never been easier — or cheaper — to get a website live. Between free hosting platforms, free DNS services, and free SSL certificates, you can have a real, functioning website on the public internet for exactly £0. This guide walks through exactly how to do it.

What You Actually Need

Before diving in, let's separate the necessities from the nice-to-haves:

• ▸A domain name — Either get a free subdomain (like yourproject.is-a.dev) or buy a .com for ~£10/year
• ▸Somewhere to host your files — There are excellent free options
• ▸SSL certificate — Completely free through Let's Encrypt or your hosting provider
• ▸A website to deploy — Your HTML/CSS/JS files, or a framework project

Option 1: The Completely Free Stack

This is the stack that costs you nothing, works reliably, and is used by tens of thousands of developers:

• ▸Domain: Free subdomain from Open Domains (e.g., yourproject.is-a.dev)
• ▸Hosting: Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages (all have free tiers)
• ▸SSL: Automatically provisioned by your hosting platform
• ▸CDN: Built into all three hosting platforms above

Step 1: Build Your Website

If you don't have a website yet, here's the quickest path:

For a simple HTML site:

my-website/
├── index.html      ← Your homepage
├── about.html      ← About page
├── style.css       ← Your styles
└── script.js       ← Optional JavaScript

For a React/Vite app:

npm create vite@latest my-website -- --template react
cd my-website
npm install
npm run dev       # Preview locally
npm run build     # Build for deployment (outputs to /dist)

Step 2: Deploy to Netlify (Easiest for Beginners)

Netlify's drag-and-drop deployment is the fastest way to get a site live:

• ▸Build your project locally (npm run build)
• ▸Go to app.netlify.com and create a free account
• ▸Drag your /dist or /build folder onto the Netlify drop zone
• ▸Your site is instantly live at a random Netlify URL like random-name-123.netlify.app

For automatic deployments on every code push, connect a GitHub repository instead.

Step 3: Get Your Free Subdomain

Visit Open Domains and request a subdomain. You'll get a URL like myproject.is-a.dev. Then create a CNAME record pointing it to your Netlify/Vercel deployment URL.

Step 4: Connect the Domain to Your Hosting

# In Netlify: Site Settings → Domain Management → Add Custom Domain
# In Vercel: Project Settings → Domains → Add Domain

# Netlify will give you a CNAME target like:
# yoursite.netlify.app

# Add this in your DNS (Open Domains dashboard):
Type: CNAME
Name: myproject   (your subdomain)
Value: yoursite.netlify.app

SSL is automatically provisioned — your site will be live at https://myproject.is-a.dev within minutes of DNS propagating.

When to Pay for Hosting

Free hosting is great for personal projects, portfolios, and experiments. Consider paying when:

• ▸Your site gets significant traffic and hits bandwidth limits
• ▸You need a backend (database, server-side processing)
• ▸You're running a commercial project (Vercel's free tier requires non-commercial use)
• ▸You need 99.9% uptime SLAs with customer-facing services