Static site hosting

Static sites rarely need us. Static sites standing next to PHP apps do.

Finished HTML, CSS, and images — written from scratch or generated from templates and content at build time. Nothing executes per request; the web server hands out files.

# Proximity beats specialization

For a static site on its own, hosts built for static output are hard to argue with — free tiers, global CDNs, instant rollbacks. We don't pretend to beat that. The site worth hosting here is the one that isn't alone: an agency running a dozen PHP apps with one static microsite in between, or a project where the marketing pages are static and the application behind them is not. One account, one deploy workflow, one bill — and when the static site sprouts a form or a search box, PHP is already there.

# Generated on deploy, or uploaded as-is

A git push triggers the deploy pipeline, and build commands run Composer and Node.js tasks before the result syncs to the web space. That is enough to run a static site generator on every deploy: Statamic's SSG on the PHP side, or JS stacks like Astro, Nuxt, and Eleventy on the Node side. The repository holds source and content; the server only ever sees the output.

This very website works that way — a Nuxt app pre-rendered at build time, served as flat files from fortrabbit.

# Nothing to size, little to pay

With no code executing per request, the smallest PHP plan is not a compromise — it's the correct choice. There is no database component to book, no cache to configure, no memory limit to reason about. Billing is pro-rated, post-paid, by the day, which keeps a site that hardly changes close to the bottom of the invoice.

# Why fortrabbit?

The static site is never really the point — everything around it is. fortrabbit is a PHP host that serves files well, not a static platform hoping to grow a runtime one day, and would rather say so than sell the wrong thing. One account, one deploy workflow, one invoice for the microsite and the applications beside it. The day the site needs a form, a search route, or a login, PHP is already underneath it.