Static Sites vs WordPress: Hosting My Static Site - Part 3

When I decided to move away from WordPress and rebuild my blog as a static site, the next big question was where to host it. Static sites give you flexibility: you can host them almost anywhere, but the choice of platform still matters for speed, cost, and workflow.

After looking at several options, I settled on Netlify. It has been a perfect fit for what I wanted: something fast, simple, and inexpensive. Let me explain why.

Previous posts in this series:

• Part 1: Static Sites vs WordPress: Rebuilding My Personal Blog After a Hack
• Part 2: Choosing the Right Static Site Generator

Hosting Options I Considered

One of the perks of static sites is that they can run almost anywhere. At the end of the day, you’re just serving HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Still, there are clear differences between platforms.

I considered:

GitHub Pages: Free, tightly integrated with GitHub, and great for simple projects. But I wanted more control over CI/CD and build options.

Vercel: A strong contender, especially for Next.js projects. It’s polished, developer friendly, and has an excellent free tier. Still, it felt more tuned toward app hosting than pure content sites.

Cloudflare Pages: A newer player, with impressive performance and a straightforward developer experience. Worth keeping an eye on, but I didn’t have much prior experience with it.

AWS Amplify or S3 + CloudFront: The “do it yourself” approach. Very powerful, very scalable, but more complex than I wanted for a personal blog. I wasn’t eager to overcomplicate things.

Then there was Netlify, which has become something of a standard for static site hosting.

Why Netlify Won

1. Speed Out of the Box

Performance is non-negotiable. One of the main reasons I moved away from WordPress was that it always felt sluggish without caching plugins and extra tuning. Netlify solved this immediately. Every site deployed there is automatically served from a global content delivery network (CDN). That means no matter where you are in the world, the content is coming from a server close to you.

I didn’t have to configure anything. No fiddling with caching headers or CDN rules: Netlify just works.

2. A Generous Free Tier

I like to keep costs under control, especially since I’m running multiple side projects in parallel. Netlify’s free tier was a huge selling point. It allows up to 100GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes per month before I’d need to think about upgrading.

Here’s my logic: if the blog ever grows beyond that usage, it should also be delivering enough value that it can cover its own hosting bill. Until then, it’s essentially free. That makes experimenting and writing much less stressful.

3. Seamless CI/CD with GitHub

The real magic of Netlify is how simple it is to set up continuous deployment. Since my code is hosted on GitHub, I just linked the repo to Netlify. Now, every time I push a change (whether that’s a new blog post, a design tweak, or even a typo fix), Netlify automatically rebuilds and redeploys the site.

This is a massive improvement over the old WordPress model, where updating a plugin or theme felt like a gamble, and where backups were always a concern. With Netlify, deployment is part of the natural flow of writing and committing.

How It Works in Practice

Here’s what publishing looks like for me now:

1. Write a post in Cursor
2. Commit it to my GitHub repo
3. Push to main
4. Netlify detects the change, runs the Hugo build, and redeploys the site in seconds

That’s it. No FTP uploads, no logging into a hosting dashboard, no worrying about downtime during updates.

Why I Didn’t Pick Something Else

The alternatives each had strengths, but none felt as balanced for my needs.

GitHub Pages: Great for free hosting, but less flexible for future growth.

Vercel: Excellent product, but more geared to web apps.

Cloudflare Pages: Interesting, but untested for me.

AWS: Too much overhead for a blog.

Netlify hit the sweet spot between simplicity, cost, and reliability.

Lessons Learned

The hosting choice reinforced a bigger point for me: when you strip things down to essentials, publishing online doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated. WordPress made me think I had to manage servers, databases, and constant updates. With Hugo and Netlify, I realized I could get the same result (or better) by focusing only on the parts that matter: writing and publishing.

Final Thoughts

Picking a hosting platform may seem like a minor decision, but it shapes your whole workflow. For me, Netlify made it easy to go from “I should reboot my blog” to having it live and running in days, not weeks.

It’s fast, reliable, and almost free. More importantly, it fits into my broader philosophy for this blog reboot: keep it simple, keep it secure, and focus on creating value, not fighting with infrastructure.

Series navigation:

• Part 1: Static Sites vs WordPress: Rebuilding My Personal Blog After a Hack
• Part 2: Choosing the Right Static Site Generator
• Part 3: Hosting My Static Site (this post)
• Part 4: Analytics Without Breaking the Bank
• Part 5: My Content Workflow (Powered by Cursor)
• Part 6: Designing and Customizing the Blog
• Part 7: Security by Design
• Part 8: Should I Monetize?
• Part 9: Driving Traffic - My Next Step
• Part 10: Wrapping Up and What’s Next

Coming next: Part 4 covers choosing the right analytics solution for a static site, comparing Google Analytics with privacy focused alternatives like Plausible and Umami.