How to Host 16 Sites for Free

The single biggest objection to running multiple websites is cost. Hosting one site is cheap. Hosting sixteen seems expensive. Shared hosting at $10/month per site is $160/month before you write a word of content. VPS instances at $5 each add up to $80/month. And managed WordPress hosting? Do not even run the numbers.

Here is what most people miss: static sites changed the economics completely. In 2026, four major hosting providers offer free tiers generous enough that you can distribute sixteen static sites across them and pay exactly nothing for hosting. Not "almost nothing." Zero.

This is not a theoretical exercise. What follows are the exact free tier limits, the allocation strategy, and the math that makes it work.

The Four Providers

Cloudflare Pages: The Backbone (8-10 Sites)

Cloudflare Pages is the most generous free hosting tier on the internet. It is not close.

Free tier includes:

• Unlimited sites on one account
• Unlimited bandwidth (not 100 GB — unlimited)
• 500 builds per month
• Unlimited requests
• Custom domains with automatic TLS
• Preview deployments for every branch

That unlimited bandwidth number is the headline. Every other provider meters bandwidth. Cloudflare does not. For a network of niche sites where traffic is unpredictable — one viral Reddit post can spike a site to 50,000 visits in a day — unlimited bandwidth eliminates the anxiety entirely.

The 500 builds/month limit sounds constraining (16 sites x 1 build/day = 480), but there is a clean workaround: build externally with GitHub Actions and deploy the pre-built output via Cloudflare's CLI. This consumes zero Cloudflare build minutes. The limit becomes irrelevant.

Bonus features at $0:

• Cloudflare Workers: 100,000 requests/day of serverless compute
• Cloudflare Web Analytics: no JavaScript tag required, runs at the network level
• Cloudflare R2: 10 GB storage with zero egress fees

Deploy your highest-traffic sites here. Eight to ten of your sixteen sites should live on Cloudflare Pages.

Netlify: The Swiss Army Knife (3-4 Sites)

Netlify's free tier trades raw bandwidth for built-in application features.

Free tier includes:

• 100 GB bandwidth per month
• 300 build minutes per month
• Netlify Forms: 100 submissions/month (no backend required)
• Netlify Functions: 125,000 invocations/month
• Netlify Identity: 1,000 active users for authentication
• Custom domains with automatic TLS

The killer feature here is Forms. Any site that needs lead capture — email signups, contact forms, quote requests — gets it free on Netlify just by adding a netlify attribute to a standard HTML <form> tag. No Typeform ($25/month). No Jotform ($34/month). No custom backend.

Netlify Functions gives you lightweight serverless endpoints: form handlers that forward to a CRM, webhook receivers, server-side API proxies that hide keys. 125,000 invocations per month is plenty for satellite sites in the growth phase.

Deploy your form-heavy and function-dependent sites here. Three to four sites on Netlify.

Vercel: The Performance Leader (2-3 Sites)

Vercel's free tier is designed around Next.js but works perfectly with any static site generator.

Free tier includes:

• 100 GB bandwidth per month
• 6,000 build minutes per month (the most generous build allocation)
• Serverless Functions included
• Edge Functions included
• Analytics (Web Vitals) included
• Custom domains with automatic TLS

Vercel's edge network is optimized for performance. If you have sites where Core Web Vitals scores matter for ranking (competitive niches, sites targeting featured snippets), Vercel's infrastructure gives you a measurable edge.

The 6,000 build minutes are also useful if you prefer building on the platform rather than externally. That is enough for multiple daily builds across two to three sites without any optimization.

Deploy your performance-critical and showcase sites here. Two to three on Vercel.

GitHub Pages: The Simplest Option (1-2 Sites)

GitHub Pages is the most basic option, but it is also the most reliable.

Free tier includes:

• 100 GB bandwidth per month (soft limit)
• Unlimited builds via GitHub Actions
• Custom domains with automatic TLS
• Direct deployment from any branch

GitHub Pages lacks the serverless functions and form handling of Netlify and Vercel. But for pure content sites — blogs, resource hubs, documentation-style sites — it works perfectly and deploys directly from your repository with zero configuration.

Deploy your simplest content-only sites here. One to two on GitHub Pages.

The Allocation Strategy

Here is how sixteen sites distribute across the four providers:

Total hosting cost: $0/month.

The bandwidth math works because static sites are small. A typical page weighs 50-200 KB including all assets. At 100 GB, Netlify can serve roughly 500,000 to 2 million page views per month across your three to four sites there. If any single site outgrows that, migrate it to Cloudflare where bandwidth is unlimited.

Why Static Sites Change the Economics

The entire strategy above assumes static sites — pre-built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript served from a CDN with no server-side processing per request.

This is not a limitation. It is the enabling constraint.

Static sites cost providers almost nothing to serve. A file sitting on a CDN edge node requires no compute per request, no database connection, no PHP interpreter, no application server. The marginal cost of serving one more page view approaches zero. That is why providers can offer unlimited bandwidth — the cost structure supports it.

WordPress, by contrast, executes PHP and queries a MySQL database on every request (unless you add caching layers, which adds complexity). That compute cost is why WordPress hosting has per-site pricing. You are paying for CPU cycles, not bytes.

Static site generators like Eleventy, Hugo, Astro, and Next.js (in static export mode) do all the expensive work at build time. The output is a folder of files. Hosting a folder of files is essentially free, and the free tiers reflect that reality.

The Build-Externally Pattern

The single most important optimization in this strategy is building externally. Instead of letting each hosting provider compile your site using their build minutes, you build on GitHub Actions and deploy the pre-built output.

GitHub Actions gives you 2,000 minutes per month on the free tier. An Eleventy build for a typical niche site takes 15-30 seconds. Sixteen sites, each built once daily, consumes about 8 minutes per day — roughly 240 minutes per month. That is 12% of your GitHub Actions allocation.

The workflow looks like this:

1. Push to your monorepo triggers a GitHub Actions matrix build
2. Each matrix job sets a different SITE_ID environment variable
3. The build produces a static output folder
4. A deploy step pushes that folder to the appropriate provider via CLI

Cloudflare's wrangler pages deploy, Netlify's netlify deploy --prod, and Vercel's vercel --prod all accept a pre-built directory. You skip their build pipelines entirely.

This approach gives you:

• Zero build minutes consumed on any hosting provider
• Consistent build environment across all sites
• Full control over Node.js version, dependencies, and build flags
• Centralized build logs in one place (GitHub Actions)

Scaling Beyond Sixteen

What happens when you outgrow sixteen sites? The same pattern extends. Create additional accounts on each provider (within their terms of service). Add more providers — Render, Surge, and Firebase Hosting all have usable free tiers. At a certain scale, you might allocate $20/month to Cloudflare Pro for one high-traffic domain and keep the rest free.

But sixteen sites on zero hosting cost is not the ceiling. It is the starting position.

The Real Cost

Hosting is free. The actual $100/month budget for a sixteen-site network goes to the things that cannot be free-tiered: domain registrations (~$10/year each via Cloudflare Registrar at cost), AI API credits for content generation, and optionally one or two premium tools with genuine moats.

The full budget breakdown — month by month, dollar by dollar — is covered in The $100 Network by J.A. Watte. Chapter 6 walks through the complete provider stack with real configuration examples, and Chapter 10 provides the month-by-month scaling calendar from site one to site sixteen.

If you are currently paying for hosting across multiple sites, this post just showed you how to stop.

This article is based on techniques from The $100 Network. If you're just getting started, begin with The $97 Launch to build your first site, then The $20 Agency to set up your marketing stack.