Guide · Start & budget
The low-cost web presence
The complete recipe: one fairly priced domain plus free Cloudflare Pages hosting gives a small business a fast, professional website without a builder subscription.
Updated 2026-10-07
This is the guide the whole site is built around. By the end you’ll know exactly what to buy, what to set up, and where to check the current verified cost in your market.
The recipe
| Piece | What we use | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | Spaceship — .com or .ca |
Current renewal in the domain table |
| Hosting | Cloudflare Pages | $0 |
| HTTPS certificate | included with Cloudflare | $0 |
| The website itself | built with AI help (guide) | $0 |
Compare the current renewal-led domain and builder totals in the calculator. Over five years, the difference can buy a useful piece of equipment for the actual business.
Proof this isn’t theoretical: the site you’re reading right now runs on this exact stack.
Who this is for (an honest filter)
This recipe fits you if your website is a brochure: what you do, where you are, when you’re open, photos of your work, how to get in touch. That describes most local service businesses, consultants, trades, clinics, restaurants that don’t do online ordering, and portfolios.
It’s not for you if you need online sales with inventory (see the e-commerce guide), or you want to visually redesign your site from your phone every week (a builder might be worth it).
Step 1: Buy your domain (10 minutes)
- Go to Spaceship and search for the name you want.
- Canadians: seriously consider
.ca. If both.caand.comare free, owning both can be useful brand insurance. Compare the current verified prices and checkout notes before deciding. - At checkout: decline every add-on. You don’t need their hosting, email trial, or SSL. WHOIS privacy is free for a
.comat Spaceship, and it matters: it keeps your name and phone number out of the public domain registry, which is exactly where the “final notice” renewal-scam letters and SEO cold calls harvest their targets. A.caworks differently: CIRA hides an individual’s details automatically, but a corporation’s are public by default. The domain guide explains which category to choose.
Why Spaceship and not GoDaddy? Because of the renewal price you’ll pay every year after. Why not Cloudflare’s own registrar? It’s also excellent (at-cost pricing, and it now sells .ca too), but it only works with Cloudflare’s own nameservers, can’t take a domain you registered elsewhere without a transfer, and has no support to speak of. Spaceship is the friendlier first registrar for non-technical owners. We earn nothing from either today; our disclosure page says so, and will say so if that ever changes.
Step 2: Get a website (an afternoon)
You need a folder of website files. In 2026 you don’t need to hire anyone for a brochure site: Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini will build you a genuinely good one from a plain-English description of your business. We wrote the exact prompts to use: Build your website with AI.
(Already have a site trapped in Wix or Squarespace? The same AI process rebuilds it — point the AI at your current site and ask it to recreate the content as a static site.)
Step 3: Put it online with Cloudflare Pages (30 minutes)
Cloudflare Pages hosts static sites free — unlimited bandwidth, global speed, HTTPS included, no ads, no “upgrade” nagging that matters. Full walkthrough: Deploy your site to Cloudflare Pages, including pointing your Spaceship domain at it.
The set-and-forget upgrade: put your site’s folder in a free private GitHub repository and connect it to Cloudflare Pages. From then on, every time you (or the AI helping you) save a change to GitHub, Cloudflare publishes it automatically — no dragging and dropping, and GitHub keeps a full history of every version of your site as a bonus backup. The deploy guide covers both paths; this site itself updates exactly this way.
The receipt
The only recurring infrastructure purchase in this route is the domain. Cloudflare Pages, HTTPS, bandwidth, and a private GitHub repository all have a suitable free route. The homepage receipt and domain comparison calculate current amounts from verified data.
What about email?
you@yourbusiness.com is the natural next step. Compare current data-backed mailbox prices or use the free routing guide until its limitations become real.
Updating your site later
Your site is a folder of files you own. To change your hours or add photos: ask the same AI to make the edit, then redeploy — drag-and-drop if you upload manually, or automatic the moment you save the change if you connected GitHub in Step 3. No subscription hostage-taking — and if some day you outgrow static, your domain simply gets pointed at whatever you move to. Nothing is ever locked in.