# Where Should a Small Business Host Its Website and Apps? (Part 2 of 5)

A brochure site, a booking app, and a multi-client agency each want a different host. Here is how a small business picks among Cloudflare, Vercel, and Netlify without quietly getting locked in.

Author: J.A. Watte
Published: June 26, 2026
Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/blog-smb-web-platform-choice/

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This is part two of a five part series on the practical AI and web stack for a small or medium business. Part one covered where your AI should run. This part covers where your website and apps should live, and how to choose without painting yourself into a corner you have to pay a developer to get out of.

The good news is that for most small businesses, hosting is now nearly free and genuinely fast. The trap is picking a platform for a feature you love today and discovering later that the same feature is the thing keeping you from leaving. So the real question is not "which host is best," it is "which host fits this specific job, and what does it cost me to change my mind."

## The three platforms, and what each is actually for

**Cloudflare** is the cheap, fast default for a static site or a small app. You can serve your pages straight off its global network for free, and requests to those static files are not billed at all. A dynamic app runs on Workers, with a free tier of 100,000 requests a day and a paid tier that is a flat $5 a month including 10 million requests. Its object storage, R2, charges nothing for bandwidth out, which matters if you serve a lot of images or downloads. Cloudflare now tells you to start new projects on Workers. For a brochure site, a menu, a simple booking form, or an internal tool, this is hard to beat on price and speed. The full tour is in [the Cloudflare developer platform](/blog/cloudflare-developer-platform/).

**Vercel** is the premium experience for teams building on the Next.js framework. You get a preview link for every change, fast rebuilds, and polished tooling. The Hobby tier is free, and the Pro tier is $20 per developer per month with a usage credit included. If your business has a developer who lives in Next.js and ships a content-heavy, frequently-changing site, that experience is worth paying for.

**Netlify** is the simplest path for a marketing site. Connect a repository, set a build command, and you get deploy previews and niceties like Forms, which now capture submissions for free with no backend code. As of its April 2026 pricing change it runs on a credit model: a free tier with 300 credits a month and one build at a time, and a Pro tier at a flat $20 a month with unlimited team members and three concurrent builds. For a small team that wants to think about infrastructure as little as possible, it is a comfortable home.

## Matching the platform to the job

Here is how it shakes out for the kinds of businesses I work with, using the actual shape of the work.

- **A solo realtor or a single-location service business with a brochure site.** This is mostly static pages plus a contact form. Cloudflare for near-zero cost and speed, or Netlify if you want Forms to handle submissions with zero code. Either is the right call. Do not reach for Vercel here; you would be paying for a framework you do not need.
- **A business with a real app: bookings, a customer portal, a quote tool.** Now you have dynamic logic and maybe a database. Cloudflare Workers handles this cheaply if you or your developer are comfortable writing the backend directly. If the app is built on Next.js and changes constantly, Vercel's developer experience earns its $20 a seat.
- **An agency or operator running many small client sites.** Netlify's flat $20-a-month-with-unlimited-seats plan and simple per-site deploys fit the many-small-sites pattern well, and Cloudflare's free tier is excellent for the static ones. This is also where keeping a repeatable, portable setup pays off, because you are doing the same thing dozens of times.

## The lock-in nobody quotes you

Every platform creates lock-in through the features you will most want to use. The skill is knowing where, and keeping it out of the parts that are expensive to rebuild.

- **Cloudflare's deepest lock is its stateful pieces:** Durable Objects, Workflows, and the bindings model. Your plain code is portable, but if your core logic lives inside those, moving is a re-architecture, not a copy.
- **Vercel's lock was historically Next-specific features.** That has eased a lot: Next.js now ships a stable adapter that other hosts use, so leaving Vercel is a known procedure rather than a rewrite.
- **Netlify's lock is its conveniences:** Forms, the redirects and headers configuration files, and the Blobs storage API. Pleasant to use, but they do not transfer to another host as-is.

None of this means avoid these platforms. It means do not let one vendor's proprietary feature own the part of your business that would be painful to rebuild.

## A better way to keep your options open

A few habits do almost all of the work, and none of them slow you down today.

1. **Keep your content portable.** Write pages as Markdown or plain HTML in a folder you own, not trapped inside one platform's proprietary page builder. Moving hosts then means re-pointing a deploy, not re-typing your site.
2. **Keep your real data in a database you can move.** Your own Postgres on a provider like Neon or Supabase, plus S3-compatible storage, travels with you. Use a host's proprietary database for what it is uniquely good at, not as the system of record for your business.
3. **Own the domain at a neutral registrar.** Your domain is your address. Keep it somewhere independent of your host so switching hosts never holds your traffic hostage.
4. **Write down how it is built.** Even a one-page note on the build command, the environment variables, and where the data lives turns "we can never touch this, the person who set it up is gone" into a Tuesday afternoon.

That is the whole premise of the Digital Empire book The $100 Network: own the pieces that are yours, rent the pieces that are commodities, and never let the plumbing trap you. When I start a new Cloudflare build I do not hand-write the config; the [Single Site Gen tool](/tools/single-site-gen/) generates a production-ready setup with the security headers and bot posture already correct. If you want the deeper architecture discussion, including when to go all-in on one platform versus splitting across several, that is [the frameworkless-versus-lock-in post](/blog/blog-cloudflare-frameworkless-vendor-lockin/).

## The honest summary

Static brochure site: Cloudflare or Netlify, near free. Real app on Next.js with a developer: Vercel is worth it. Many small client sites: Netlify plus Cloudflare. Whatever you pick, keep your content, your data, and your domain portable, and you can always change your mind for the cost of an afternoon instead of a rebuild. Next in this series, the same thinking applied to taking money.

## The series

- Previous: [Part 1, local AI vs cloud APIs](/blog/blog-smb-ai-local-vs-cloud/)
- **Part 2 (this post):** Picking a web platform without lock-in
- Next: [Part 3, Square and a portable storefront for taking money](/blog/blog-smb-square-portable-storefront/)

## Related reading

- [The Cloudflare developer platform](/blog/cloudflare-developer-platform/), the full tour of what you can build
- [Going frameworkless on Cloudflare vs vendor lock-in](/blog/blog-cloudflare-frameworkless-vendor-lockin/), the deeper architecture decision
- [Netlify WAF vs Cloudflare double-CDN](/blog/blog-netlify-waf-vs-cloudflare-double-cdn/), what happens when platforms overlap
- [Single Site Gen](/tools/single-site-gen/), generate a production-ready build prompt

## Fact-check notes and sources

Hosting prices and limits change; treat these as approximate mid-2026 figures and confirm on each vendor's page before relying on them.

- Cloudflare Workers (Free 100k requests/day, Paid $5/month, static-asset requests free, R2 zero egress): [Workers pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/), [R2 pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/). "Start with Workers, not Pages": [best practices](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/best-practices/workers-best-practices/).
- Vercel (Hobby free, Pro $20/seat + $20 usage credit): [Vercel pricing](https://vercel.com/pricing).
- Netlify (April 2026 credit model: Free 300 credits / 1 build, Pro $20 flat with unlimited seats / 3 builds, Forms free): [Netlify pricing](https://www.netlify.com/pricing/) and [April 2026 changelog](https://www.netlify.com/changelog/2026-04-14-pricing-updates-april-2026/).
- Next.js cross-platform adapter (eased Vercel lock-in): [Next.js across platforms](https://nextjs.org/blog/nextjs-across-platforms).

*This post is informational, not a paid endorsement, and no affiliation with Cloudflare, Vercel, or Netlify is implied. Prices and limits are current as of mid-2026 and change; verify before building on them.*


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