When I relaunched this site back in March I rebuilt everything from scratch — new design, pure HTML and CSS, no WordPress, no bloat. The one thing I didn't change was where it was hosted. It was still sitting on the same Heart Internet shared hosting plan I'd been paying for since 2018.
That changed this week. And I'm annoyed it took me this long.
What I was paying for
Shared hosting with Heart Internet — a package that included web hosting, FTP access, and an SSL certificate. Reasonable enough at the time. The SSL alone used to cost real money, and shared hosting was the standard way to get a site online.
The workflow was: make changes locally, open FileZilla, connect to the server, drag files across. Every single time. It worked, but it was tedious and completely manual. One missed file and something breaks on the live site.
What I actually needed
This site is pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There's no database, no server-side code, no WordPress, nothing that needs to execute on a server. It's just files. Static files that need to be served to a browser.
For that use case, Netlify is free. Completely free. You connect your GitHub repository, point your domain at it, and every time you push code the site updates automatically. No FileZilla. No manual uploads. No unlocking FTP access. Just push and it's live.
The SSL certificate is also free — provisioned automatically via Let's Encrypt the moment your domain points to Netlify. It renews itself. You never think about it again.
Why has this been a paid thing for so long?
Let's Encrypt launched in 2016 and made SSL certificates free for everyone. Netlify and services like it have been around for years. The hosting industry just never had an incentive to tell you that what you were paying for had become unnecessary.
SSL certificates were a significant revenue stream for hosting companies — charging £50-100 a year for something that's now free is a good business if your customers don't know any better. I didn't. Most people don't.
I'm a UI developer. I work with this stuff professionally. I was still paying for it.
What it costs now
Domain registration at Heart Internet — about £12 a year. That's it. Hosting, SSL, automatic deploys, custom domain — all free on Netlify's free tier. The bandwidth limit is 100GB a month, which I'd need hundreds of thousands of visitors to exceed.
If you've got a static site — a blog, a portfolio, a brochure site — and you're paying for shared hosting, it's worth ten minutes of your time to look at whether you actually need to be.
— Johnny