Astro Hosting UK
Where to Host, and What It Costs
Where should an Astro website be hosted in the UK, what does it cost, and which option suits your business? This guide sets out the four hosts worth considering, the one we use for UK clients and why, and the hosting we provide ourselves on every Astro site we build.
What Astro Hosting Actually Means
The hosting question changes shape when the website does.
An Astro website is built differently from a WordPress one, and that changes what "hosting" means. A WordPress site is a small application — every page load wakes up PHP, queries a MySQL database, runs a dozen plugins, and renders the HTML on the fly. The host has to provide a server that can run all of that, every time someone visits. That's why WordPress hosting is a monthly bill rather than a one-off, and feels like a serious operational commitment.
An Astro site is the opposite. Astro builds your entire website into a folder of plain HTML files before anyone ever visits. The host's only job is to serve those files when someone asks for them. That's a much smaller, much cheaper job — and it changes everything about the economics, the performance, and the reliability of the website.
The practical consequence: hosting an Astro website costs almost nothing. Most UK business sites will run for free on a platform like Netlify or Cloudflare Pages until their traffic grows by ten or twenty times. The hosting bill, for a site that used to carry a monthly WordPress hosting charge, is now £0 — and the site is faster, more secure, and more reliable as a side effect.
The rest of this page covers the four hosts worth considering, what each does well, what they cost, and which one we use for UK clients. The short version is Netlify, but the reasons matter, because they are the same reasons one of the other three might be the right call for you.
The Four Hosts Worth Considering
Every Astro hosting recommendation eventually narrows down to these four. They are not all equal — but they are all credible.
Netlify
Our default for UK clients
The most polished of the four. Free tier includes 100GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes, automatic HTTPS, branch previews, and built-in form handling. The dashboard is approachable for non-developers, the deployment from Git is one click, and the documentation is the best in the category. Paid plans start at about £7 a month for Personal and about £16 for Pro, read 19 August 2026.
Best for: nearly everyone. Default choice unless you have a specific reason to pick another.
Cloudflare Pages
The bandwidth king
Cloudflare's free tier is the most generous in the industry: unlimited bandwidth, unlimited requests, on a network that covers more of the planet than any competitor. The trade-off is that the developer ergonomics are a step behind Netlify — the build settings are less forgiving and form handling needs more work to set up. Excellent for high-traffic sites where Netlify's bandwidth limits become a real consideration.
Best for: content sites expecting heavy traffic, or businesses already using Cloudflare DNS.
Vercel
The developer favourite
Vercel was built by the team behind Next.js and the platform feels engineered for developers first. Astro runs beautifully on it, especially with server-side rendering. The free tier includes 100GB bandwidth and the deployment experience is excellent. The reason it isn't our default for UK businesses is the pricing structure: once you exceed the free tier, costs can climb faster than Netlify's equivalent.
Best for: development agencies, or sites with significant server-side rendering needs.
GitHub Pages
The minimalist option
Free, simple, and reliable for genuinely static sites. The trade-off is that GitHub Pages is built for documentation and personal projects, not commercial websites. No form handling, no edge functions, no built-in analytics, and limited control over redirects and headers. For a developer's portfolio it's perfect. For a business that needs a contact form and SEO redirects, you'll end up bolting on other services anyway.
Best for: developer portfolios, project documentation, simple brochure sites with no forms.
Why We Use Netlify for UK Sites
The decision was made in 2024, on real client sites, and it has held since.
When our own sites and our clients' sites moved to Astro in 2024, all four hosts were tested on real client sites before one became the default. The choice came down to how each works day to day. Cloudflare Pages had a better free tier on paper, Vercel had a slicker developer experience and GitHub Pages was the cheapest path of all, but Netlify was the only one a client could open and understand what they were looking at.
That matters more than it sounds. The hosting platform is the tool a client uses on the day they decide to take their site to another developer. If the dashboard is impenetrable, the client is locked in by confusion, and that is a kind of lock-in we refuse to build. Netlify's dashboard is clear enough that any competent developer can pick up a site we have built and carry on with it inside half a day. Your freedom to leave is the part we care about most.
The technical reasons follow. The global CDN puts edge nodes in London, Manchester, and Dublin, so UK visitors get sub-second response times even though the origin servers are in the US. HTTPS certificates renew themselves through Let's Encrypt. Form submissions land in the Netlify dashboard and forward to email — no plugin, no extra service, no monthly fee. Continuous deployment from GitHub means every Git push triggers a fresh build, with a preview URL for every branch. It is the pipeline a careful engineer would build given three months, and it comes ready-made.
The one thing Netlify doesn't do is run a database for you. If your site needs user accounts, a member area or live commerce, Supabase, Stripe or a dedicated headless CMS sits on top. For the service, portfolio, catalogue and content sites that make up nearly all of our client work, Netlify is the whole answer. The hosting bill stays at zero, the site stays fast, and the client owns every file.
What Astro Hosting Actually Costs in the UK
The numbers as they stand, not the brochure version.
For a typical UK business website, whether a service firm, a consultancy, a manufacturer or a B2B supplier, the monthly hosting cost on Netlify is zero. That isn't a promotional rate or an introductory offer. It's the standing arrangement until your traffic exceeds 100GB a month, which most business sites don't approach in a year.
A useful rule of thumb: 100GB of monthly bandwidth supports somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 page views, depending on how image-heavy your site is. If you're getting 5,000 visits a month, you're using about 3% of the free tier. The closest any of our clients has come to the limit was after a viral LinkedIn post sent fifteen thousand visitors in a single day, and even then the monthly total didn't quite tip over.
The paid tiers, if you ever need them, start at about £7 a month for Netlify's Personal plan, and about £16 for Pro (1TB bandwidth, advanced analytics, role-based access). Cloudflare Pages has no bandwidth cap at all on the free tier and remains the cheapest option for high-traffic sites. The point is that even at scale, Astro hosting costs are an order of magnitude lower than the equivalent WordPress hosting bill.
What you replace, with this arrangement, is not just the hosting bill from your old WordPress host. It's the plugin licences stacked on top of it, and these are the vendors' own published prices rather than our estimates: Yoast SEO Premium at £118.80 a year, Wordfence Premium at $149, UpdraftPlus Premium at £84 including VAT, and Elementor Pro from £4 a month billed annually. Read from each vendor's pricing page on 20 August 2026. Your stack may be none of those four, but it will be something like them.
Static vs Server-Rendered: Two Hosting Modes
One small distinction that occasionally matters.
Astro can be built in two modes. The default is static — every page becomes an HTML file at build time and is served as a file from the CDN. This is what most business sites need and it is our default. The hosting requirement is minimal, the performance is exceptional, and the site is genuinely just a folder of files.
The alternative is server-side rendering (SSR), where pages are generated on each request by server-side code. SSR is useful for member areas, search results, complex forms, dynamic pricing, or anything that needs to read live data at the moment of the page request. SSR changes the hosting requirement — you now need a host that can run server-side code, which all four hosts above support (Netlify Functions, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Serverless, or your own Node.js server).
Most business sites should be static. SSR adds complexity, costs money once you exceed the free function-call allowances, and slows the response time by 100-300ms compared to a pure static page. If your site doesn't need it, don't pay for it. If you're not sure whether your site needs it, it doesn't. If a build does need SSR, you will be told at the scoping stage; it is usually obvious within five minutes of reading the requirements.
UK-Specific Considerations
The questions UK clients ask that the American hosting guides don't answer.
GDPR and data location. Netlify and Cloudflare both have UK and EU edge nodes and offer data processing agreements compliant with UK GDPR. Form submissions can be configured to route to EU-region storage. For nearly every UK business, whether a service firm, a consultancy, a manufacturer or a B2B supplier, the standard Netlify configuration is GDPR-compliant out of the box. If you're processing payment data or sensitive health information, the conversation becomes more involved and you should speak to your legal team before deploying.
UK DNS and custom domains. All four hosts handle UK domains (.co.uk, .uk, .london) without any quirks. You can either point your existing UK domain at Netlify with two DNS records (a CNAME or an ALIAS), or transfer DNS management to Netlify for one-click setup. We usually leave DNS with the client's existing registrar: fewer points of failure, and easier to walk away if needed.
UK customer support. None of the four hosts have UK-based support teams. Cloudflare and Netlify have business-hours coverage across European working hours; Vercel's support is US-centric but responsive over email. Since client sites moved to Netlify in 2024, we have opened two support tickets, and both were resolved inside 24 hours. The platform is reliable enough that the support gap rarely matters.
Email hosting is separate. Netlify hosts websites, not mailboxes. You'll keep your email with whoever currently provides it — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, your existing UK hosting provider, or somewhere else. The DNS configuration for email (MX records, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) carries over from your old setup unchanged, and we handle the DNS during a migration so there is no email downtime.
Hosting Through Cooper Agency
If you'd rather not think about any of this, we host it for you.
Every Astro website we build for a client is hosted on Netlify, set up under our account by default, and configured with the canonical URL handling, SSL, form routing and analytics that make the difference between a fast site and a fast site that ranks. The hosting itself is included in the Astro Website service — there is no separate hosting bill.
If you'd rather run it yourself, the £2,490 outright build is the other arrangement: you buy the codebase, and you deploy, host and maintain it yourself, with no subscription and no tether to us; this page is the manual for exactly that setup. The files are yours either way, and there is never any platform lock-in.
If you have an existing Astro site that needs better hosting, or an existing WordPress or Wix site you would like moved onto Astro with Netlify hosting included, the WordPress to Astro migration page covers the full process. The hosting is the easy part of the move; the migration of content, SEO, and 301 redirects is where most of the work sits.
Astro Hosting Questions Clients Ask
The questions buyers put to us before the first call.
Related Services
The hosting is included with every build. Here's what comes with it.
Astro Website Design
Specialist Astro websites with Netlify hosting, SSL and ongoing updates included. The full build, not only the hosting.
Learn more →WordPress to Astro Migration
Full migration from WordPress with SEO preservation, 301 redirects, and Netlify deployment included. From £2,490 one-time.
Learn more →Wix to Astro Migration
Moving off Wix instead of WordPress? Same hosting outcome, different starting point. Includes SEO redirects and zero-downtime cutover.
Learn more →Squarespace to Astro Migration
Moving off Squarespace? Same hosting outcome — Netlify-based, free for typical small-business traffic, UK CDN edge.
Learn more →Talk to Us About Your Astro Site
Whether it is hosting an Astro site you already have, a move from WordPress, or a new site built from scratch, the first call is with the principal who will lead the work.
Before we speak, Tony reads your site against what you want to be found for, so the first call starts with what we found. We answer every enquiry within 24 hours on working days.
07963 242210