If you're building a new website in 2026, you have more hosting options than ever. Vercel and Netlify are popular for modern web apps. AWS and Google Cloud are the enterprise standards. And then there's ICP.
Most comparisons focus on features and developer experience. This one focuses on cost over time, because for a business owner, the five-year number is what matters.
The options
Vercel is a popular deployment platform optimized for modern JavaScript frameworks. Excellent developer experience. Fast CDN. Free tier available but limited. Pro plan starts at $20 per month per user. Custom domains, advanced analytics, and team features push costs higher quickly.
Netlify is similar territory. Generous free tier for simple static sites. As your site grows and you add forms, functions, and bandwidth, the costs scale up. Teams and business plans run $19 to $99 per month.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the enterprise standard. Powerful, flexible, and complex. A typical small business website on AWS with S3, CloudFront, and Route 53 runs $20 to $60 per month depending on traffic. More complex applications cost significantly more.
ICP has no monthly hosting fee. One-time deployment cost is built into the project price. After that, zero recurring charges.
Five-year cost comparison
| Year 1 | Year 3 | Year 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel Pro | $240 | $720 | $1,200 |
| Netlify Pro | $228 | $684 | $1,140 |
| AWS (typical) | $600 | $1,800 | $3,000 |
| ICP | $0 | $0 | $0 |
These are conservative estimates. Vercel and Netlify costs rise as your site grows in traffic and functionality. AWS costs scale with usage. ICP costs stay at zero regardless of growth.
What you're actually paying for
With Vercel and Netlify, you're paying for a managed deployment experience. The developer tooling is excellent. For teams shipping code constantly, the workflow benefits can justify the cost.
With AWS, you're paying for infrastructure flexibility and scale. Overkill for most business websites but the right choice for complex applications with specific requirements.
With ICP, you're paying nothing ongoing because the protocol's economics cover compute and storage. You're not getting a managed deployment dashboard. You're getting permanent, owned infrastructure.
The question worth asking
For a typical business website, what does Vercel's deployment workflow give you that justifies $1,200 over five years?
For many businesses, the honest answer is not much. The site gets deployed, it runs, it doesn't need constant redeployment. The developer experience benefits accrue to the developer, not the business owner.
The $3,000 you'd spend on AWS over five years is real money. For many small businesses that's a month of payroll, a significant marketing campaign, or meaningful reinvestment in the business.
ICP is not the right choice for every project. Legacy stacks don't run on it. Some integrations require additional work. If you have a development team already deep in AWS infrastructure, switching isn't necessarily worth it.
But for a business starting fresh, building a new site, with no legacy infrastructure to maintain, the case for paying $0 in hosting rather than $3,000 over five years is pretty straightforward.
