Static versus dynamic hosting

What actually differs between a prebuilt site and one rendered per request, and how to choose between the hosting models.

The four models you will meet

Model	What runs at request time	Fits
Static files	Nothing - the file is served as-is	Docs, blogs, marketing sites, this tutorial site
Pre-rendered (SSG)	Nothing; HTML was built ahead of time	Content sites that need templating at build
Server-rendered (SSR)	An application process per request	Personalised pages, live data, sessions
Serverless / functions	One isolated function invocation	Form handlers, webhooks, light APIs

Static does not mean hand-written HTML. It means the output of a build: a generator reads Markdown or a data structure and writes complete HTML files. The result is cheap, cacheable and has almost no failure surface, because there is no process that can run out of memory mid-request.

Choosing honestly

Anything that is the same for every visitor should be static - it is faster and cheaper at any scale.
Per-user content (dashboards, carts) belongs on a server or in a function, not in a CDN cache.
Static hosting has no server-side secrets: anything you put in the build ends up public in the output.
Search ranking favours the model that returns full HTML in the first response; client-side-only rendering risks being indexed later or not at all.
A hybrid is normal: static pages for content, a small function for the contact form.

# serving a built directory: the whole static story
server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  server_name example.com;

  root /var/www/site/dist;
  index index.html;

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;          # serve files, never a PHP-style handler
  }

  location /assets/ {
    add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable";
  }
}

💡

A static host cannot execute code, so it cannot be compromised into running yours. That is the real security argument, and it is worth more than the speed argument.

FAQ

Can a static site have a search box or comments?

Yes - either with a third-party service that runs the logic elsewhere, or with a serverless function you call from the page. The site stays static; the dynamic part is a separate service.

Is static hosting cheaper?

Usually free or a few dollars a month even at high traffic, because serving a file from an edge cache costs a fraction of running a process per request.

Build and deploy workflows How a CDN serves your content

Last refreshed 2026-09-18.

Static versus dynamic hosting

The four models you will meet

Choosing honestly

FAQ

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