Hosting
Free hosting vs paid hosting
Free static hosting on a CDN platform is genuinely excellent and costs nothing. Free shared hosting with a free subdomain is a different thing entirely — it typically means no HTTP/2, no Brotli, crawler denylists you cannot see, and a domain you do not own.
Side by side
| Compared on | Free shared + subdomain | Free CDN platform | Paid shared |
|---|---|---|---|
| Own the address | No | No, until you add a domain | Yes, with your own domain |
| HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 | Often neither | Yes | Usually |
| Brotli | Rarely | Yes | Sometimes |
| AI crawler access | Frequently blocked at the edge | Not blocked | Usually fine |
| Runs PHP and MySQL | Yes | No | Yes |
When Free hosting is the right choice
- Learning, prototyping, or a project with no commercial stake
- A temporary staging environment nobody will find
When paid hosting is the right choice
- Any statically generated site, at any level of seriousness
- When you want performance and crawler access without paying
- When git-based deployment matters
The cost that is not money
A free subdomain is not an asset you own. You cannot transfer it, you cannot control its DNS, and you cannot put a CDN in front of it. Every business card, invoice and profile carrying that address raises the cost of eventually leaving.
The blocking problem specifically
Free shared hosts commonly apply user-agent denylists at their edge, refusing AI crawlers before any of your configuration runs. It is invisible from a browser and unfixable from your account, which makes it the strongest single argument for moving.
The verdict
Free CDN hosting for a static site is a genuinely good choice with no asterisk. Free shared hosting on a free subdomain is a temporary arrangement that gets more expensive to leave every month you stay.
If you want the full treatment
Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who wrote this comparison
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. Where a comparison involves something I sell, the page says so — and every comparison here has to name at least two situations where each side wins, because a comparison one option always wins is an advert with a table in it.