Static web · since 1998 · est. Belfast

Hosting for HTML.
Not WordPress.1

JSON content. Custom edit panels. Pre‑rendered HTML on Cloudflare's edge. Three hundred cities. Zero hosting bills.2 Built for everyone who's done renting their website from a plugin economy.

Pre-rendered HTML JSON content Git-versioned Cloudflare Pages £0/mo, forever
hosting.io / miabella.uk / pages / home live · cached at 38ms
01 content.jsongit · main
{
  "page": "home",
  "hero": {
    "headline": "The Electric Age",
    "sub": "40 years of rock,
            in one room.",
    "cta": "Buy tickets →"
  },
  "tour": [
    { "city": "Belfast",
      "date": "2026-06-12" },
    { "city": "Dublin",
      "date": "2026-06-19" }
  ],
  "published": true,
  "updated": "2026-05-16"
}
02 edit panelpage · home
The Electric Age
40 years of rock, in one room.
Buy tickets →
Yes — visible to the world
unsaved · 1 field
03 miabella.uklive
● now playing — Belfast, 12 jun
The Electric Age

40 years of rock, in one room. Four-piece touring band, covers Alice in Chains through Pink Floyd.

Buy tickets → Hear the band
miabella.uk · LCP 0.9s · TTFB 38ms · edge-served
edit panel writes JSON commit triggers build HTML lands on 300 edges
↳ 1. Or whatever-it-is your team is currently running. Webflow. Squarespace. Wix. Shopify, even, for the brochure-y bits. We host that too — if it's HTML, it lands.
↳ 2. Cloudflare Pages is free. GitHub is free. Static HTML serves itself. We charge exactly £0/mo for hosting and we mean it. See pricing.
01 / The thesis

Your website wants to be HTML.
WordPress is just
what your agency knows.

WordPress was the right answer in 2009.3 It's the wrong answer in 2026 — not because the core got worse, but because everything bolted on around it got expensive, fragile, and someone else's problem.

The circular logic that nobody breaks.

Ask any agency why your site is on WordPress and you'll get the same answer dressed up in seven different ways. The honest one is: their next hire knows WordPress. Their plugin licences renew. Their content shape is locked to The Post.

So every brochure site, every band page, every regional law firm — same five-page WP install. Same fourteen plugins. Same £840 a year disappearing into a maintenance contract nobody can quite itemise.

None of this is your fault. It's what the supply side chose. We're trying to choose differently.

The WordPress wayYou are renting your website.

  • Elementor / Divi Pro: £79/yr — forever.
  • WP Rocket cache: £49/yr because pages render too slow without it.
  • Yoast Premium: £89/yr to do what semantic HTML does for free.
  • "Managed" hosting: £30+/mo, renewing 8% higher every year.
  • Plugin updates that break things, monthly.
  • No version control. No undo. The last "Save" is the only save.
  • PHP & MySQL on every page load, in 2026.

The hosting.io wayYou own your website.

  • Content lives as JSON, in your Git repo. You can read it. You can move it.
  • Pre-rendered HTML. No PHP, no DB, no plugin layer.
  • Cloudflare Pages: £0/mo, 300 cities, generous free tier.
  • Every change is a commit. Roll back any version, any time.
  • Custom edit panel built for your content shape — same as WP, minus 26 plugins.
  • No plugin licences. Ever. Nothing renews.
  • Nothing to update. HTML in 2026 is the same HTML as 2014.

The annual bill, side by side.

Typical 30-page brochure site. Costs vary; the direction doesn't.

Line itemWordPresshosting.io
Managed hostingGenerous CF Pages free tier
£420
£0
Page builder licenceCustom editor included
£79
£0
Cache pluginPre-rendered — nothing to cache
£49
£0
SEO pluginHTML is the SEO
£89
£0
Security pluginNo PHP, no DB, no surface area
£99
£0
Backups & stagingGit is the backup. Branches are staging.
£60
£0
Plugin-breakage supportNo plugins to break
£200
£0
Total per year
£996
£0
↳ 3. The exceptions are real — if you genuinely need a forum, a comment system, a 50,000-page editorial CMS, or a thirty-author publication, WordPress is still pretty good at those. For the other 90% of brochure-y sites we audit, it isn't.
02 / How it works

Three boxes. That's the whole stack.

You edit in a panel as friendly as WP. It writes JSON to your Git repo. A build turns it into HTML. Cloudflare serves it from the closest edge to whoever asked. Done.

01 — EDIT

The edit panel.

Custom-built for your content shape — pages, products, posts, tour dates, whatever. Reads and writes JSON. No PHP behind it. Your team logs in, types, hits commit.

page · home
headline
The Electric Age
subhead
40 years of rock…
02 — COMMIT

JSON in Git.

Every save is a commit. Every commit is a version. Roll back to last Tuesday's headline in two clicks. The history is yours — not buried in a hosted database somewhere.

$ git log --oneline
a3f9c1content: hero headline
72e08acontent: new tour dates
5b4d22design: nav spacing
dc1e90content: blog post
↳ every edit, traceable. forever.
03 — SERVE

HTML on the edge.

Cloudflare Pages takes the build and replicates it to 300 cities. No origin server. No PHP. No "please wait while the database catches up". 38ms TTFB, anywhere.

LonDubAmsFra NYCLAXSINSYD DXBGRUTYOJNB
TTFB 38ms avg
Bytes served / mo: (free tier)
03 / The editor

Not a code window. A panel.

The reason people stay on WordPress is editing. So we built editing. A custom panel, shaped to your content. Your team uses it the same way they used WP — minus the 27 plugins.4

miabella.uk / pages / home ● autosaved · 12 seconds ago
files14 entries
PAGES
📄homeedited
📄about
📄tour
📄press
COLLECTIONS
📁blog/23
📁dates/11
📁members/4
CONFIG
site.json
nav.json
theme.json
edit · pages/homeschema: page
pages / home
The Electric Age
Buy tickets →
/tour
Yes — live on miabella.uk
3 unsaved changes · last build 41s ago
preview · miabella.ukmobile · live
miabella · indie rock · belfast

The Electric Age

40 years of rock, in one room. Four-piece touring band, covers Alice in Chains through Pink Floyd.

Buy tickets → Hear the band
Lighthouse 100 · 100 · 100 · 93 edge · DUB · 38ms
↳ 4. If your content has eight distinct types (page, post, product, event, gallery, team, FAQ, location) you get eight editor forms. We build them. The user side feels identical to WP. The substrate is JSON, not a database.
04 / Drop-in artifacts

Or: drop in HTML.
Get a URL.5

Claude generated something. v0 generated something. Your designer sent you a 2,400-line single-file experiment. A one-off campaign landing. An archive of a thing that mattered.

You don't want to learn Vercel for it. You don't want to deal with Netlify CLI for it. You don't want it living on a Notion link that breaks next Tuesday.

Drag the file in. We give it a URL. We keep it there.

retro-cdn.html
One-page pitch deck, 1,180 lines. Live since March.
→ hosting.io/u/retro
solar-budget-2026.html
Interactive calculator, single file. 3,400 visits.
→ hosting.io/u/solar
moms-cookbook/
43 recipes, JSON + edit panel. Mother updates it weekly.
→ cookbook.fam
↳ 5. The URL is forever. We mean that. If hosting.io ever stops existing, you get a tarball of every site you ever uploaded, with a script to redeploy it to any Cloudflare Pages account in twelve seconds. That's a promise; it's also our exit clause.
05 / Pricing

It's free.
Because hosting is free.6

Cloudflare Pages is free. GitHub is free. Static HTML serves itself. We charge exactly £0/mo for hosting and we mean it. If we charged for it, we'd be the same line item we're trying to get you off.

£0/mo, forever
no card · no trial · no ‘starter tier'

What you get.

  • Unlimited sites, unlimited HTML files
  • Custom subdomain on hosting.io/u/yourname
  • Bring your own domain — free, no upcharge
  • Pre-built edit panel for static HTML & JSON-driven sites
  • Git-versioned content — every change a commit
  • Cloudflare Pages edge serving — 300 cities, 38ms TTFB
  • Forever tarball — you can leave any time, take your stuff
We do charge for custom editor builds (one-off, from £950), and for Web9 to come in and rebuild your existing WordPress site (from £4,800). The hosting itself? Free. Always.
06 / The lineage

Built by the team behind Web9.

Since 1998, in Belfast. We've spent twenty-eight years building sites that load in under a second — first because dial-up forced it, then because we couldn't unlearn the habit.

hosting.io is the platform we run our own client work on. We're opening it up because the alternative — watching another two thousand SMEs sleep-walk into another £840/yr WP maintenance contract — is harder to stomach every year.

Visit Web9 →

w9 Web9 · est. 1998 · Belfast, NI

Rebuilds for businesses stuck on WordPress. Custom editors, JSON content, static HTML on the edge. Twenty-eight years of building things on the web. We still pick up the phone.

28y
on the web
300
edge cities
£0
hosting bill
"We were paying £92 a month to a managed-WP host nobody at our agency could name. hosting.io took us to £0 and the site got faster. The edit panel they built feels exactly like the WP we left."
— placeholder · Director, Belfast SME