Nothing to assemble
Your pages are built once, when you build them. Nothing is queried or rendered while a visitor waits, so response time collapses to how far the packet has to travel.
Pure speed for static sites
Static Web Hosting
HTML, CSS, JavaScript and assets served straight from the edge. There are no databases on these plans and nothing is assembled when someone visits, so pages arrive as fast as the network can carry them.
A small surface to defend
There is no database on these plans, and a site made of files has no CMS login and no plugin chain for anyone to poke at. The platform underneath stays patched and monitored by us.
Deploy however you like
Push to a Git repository, drop the folder over SFTP, rsync it from your terminal or publish from your CI pipeline. Git deployment is included on every tier.
Simple, published pricing
Four tiers. No asterisks.
Every limit that applies to your account is printed below. Prices are per month in US dollars. There is no annual plan and no contract, because we would rather earn next month than lock you into twelve.
Static Lite
One fast site, live in minutes.
$3.99/mo
Billed monthly. Cancel any time.
Price locked for 5 years Get Static Lite- 1 website
- 5 GB NVMe storage
- 250 GB / month
- Global Edge CDN included
- Git deployment included
- 10 subdomains
- 1 mailbox (10 GB)
- Free SSL, auto-renewed
- Managed DNS
- Daily offsite backups, 14-day retention
- Rack1 Burst included
- No MySQL databases
Static
Room for a handful of projects.
$7.99/mo
Billed monthly. Cancel any time.
Price locked for 5 years Get Static- 5 websites
- 15 GB NVMe storage
- 750 GB / month
- Global Edge CDN included
- Git deployment included
- 50 subdomains
- 5 mailboxes (10 GB each)
- Free SSL, auto-renewed
- Managed DNS
- Daily offsite backups, 14-day retention
- Rack1 Burst included
- No MySQL databases
Static Pro
For studios shipping client sites.
$14.99/mo
Billed monthly. Cancel any time.
Price locked for 5 years Get Static Pro- 15 websites
- 40 GB NVMe storage
- 2 TB / month
- Global Edge CDN + priority routing
- Git deployment included
- 150 subdomains
- 20 mailboxes (10 GB each)
- Free SSL, auto-renewed
- Managed DNS
- Daily offsite backups, 30-day retention
- Rack1 Burst included
- No MySQL databases
Static Max
High-volume static delivery.
$24.99/mo
Billed monthly. Cancel any time.
Price locked for 5 years Get Static Max- 40 websites
- 100 GB NVMe storage
- 5 TB / month
- Global Edge CDN + priority routing
- Git deployment included
- 400 subdomains
- 50 mailboxes (10 GB each)
- Free SSL, auto-renewed
- Managed DNS
- Daily offsite backups, 30-day retention
- Rack1 Burst included
- No MySQL databases
Static plans do not include MySQL databases. They are built and priced around serving files, and everything you store counts towards the storage allowance printed above. Rack1 Burst adds compute during traffic spikes at no extra cost; it does not change your published bandwidth allowance. If your site has a good month and goes a little over its bandwidth allowance, we will do our best to absorb it. We do not think customers should be punished for their site doing well. If the excess becomes substantial or persistent we will contact you, and additional bandwidth may be charged at a rate not exceeding $0.10 per GB. Moving to a larger plan is usually cheaper, and we will say so. Full policy.
Static tiers, side by side
| Plan | Static Lite | Static | Static Pro | Static Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $3.99 | $7.99 | $14.99 | $24.99 |
| Websites | 1 website | 5 websites | 15 websites | 40 websites |
| Storage | 5 GB NVMe storage | 15 GB NVMe storage | 40 GB NVMe storage | 100 GB NVMe storage |
| Bandwidth | 250 GB / month | 750 GB / month | 2 TB / month | 5 TB / month |
| Edge CDN | Global Edge CDN included | Global Edge CDN included | Global Edge CDN + priority routing | Global Edge CDN + priority routing |
| Git deployment | Git deployment included | Git deployment included | Git deployment included | Git deployment included |
| Subdomains | 10 subdomains | 50 subdomains | 150 subdomains | 400 subdomains |
| Email mailboxes | 1 mailbox (10 GB) | 5 mailboxes (10 GB each) | 20 mailboxes (10 GB each) | 50 mailboxes (10 GB each) |
| SSL certificates | Free SSL, auto-renewed | Free SSL, auto-renewed | Free SSL, auto-renewed | Free SSL, auto-renewed |
| Managed DNS | Managed DNS | Managed DNS | Managed DNS | Managed DNS |
| Offsite backups | Daily offsite backups, 14-day retention | Daily offsite backups, 14-day retention | Daily offsite backups, 30-day retention | Daily offsite backups, 30-day retention |
| Rack1 Burst | Rack1 Burst included | Rack1 Burst included | Rack1 Burst included | Rack1 Burst included |
| MySQL databases | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
Under the hood
Deploy it your way
Push to a Git repository, upload over SFTP, drag files into the control panel's file manager, or publish straight from your CI pipeline. There's no build step on our side and nothing to configure, so when the files change, the edge simply picks them up.
Any generator you like
Hugo, Astro, Eleventy, Jekyll, Next.js static export or plain hand-written HTML. If it produces files, we'll serve them.
Clean URLs and redirects
Custom error pages, redirect rules and directory index handling, all configurable without touching a server.
Git on every tier
Deploy by pushing to a repository on your account, or connect an external one on GitHub or GitLab. Included from the $3.99 plan up.
Nothing between file and visitor
Your pages don't run a query or render a template while someone waits, because the work was already done at build time. The fastest page is the one that was finished yesterday.
Transparent pricing
5year
price guarantee
price guarantee
The monthly price you start on is the monthly price you pay for at least 5 years. Not an introductory rate, not a launch offer, not a number that creeps up once you have moved your site across and stopped paying attention.
We would rather earn next month than trap you in a twelve month contract, which is also why there is no annual plan and no minimum term. The guarantee is written into our Terms of Service, so it is a commitment rather than a slogan.
- No introductory rate. The price on the card is not a first-year teaser that quietly doubles at renewal.
- No bait and switch. The limits printed on your plan are the limits you get, and they do not shrink later.
- No surprise rate hikes. Your monthly price cannot go up during the guarantee, whatever our costs do.
- No loyalty penalty. Existing customers never pay more than someone signing up today for the same plan.
What the guarantee does not cover
- Domain registrations and renewals. Domain pricing is set by the registries that run each extension, and they change their own fees. We pass those through rather than pretending we control them.
- Managed Cloud, when it launches. It reserves real CPU and memory for your account alone, so it tracks the cost of the hardware underneath it. We will say plainly at launch what the pricing commitment is.
- Applicable taxes. Sales tax, VAT and their equivalents are set by governments, not by us.
Why static is quick
The fastest page is the one
The fastest page is the one
that was finished yesterday
A dynamic page is assembled from scratch for every visitor. A static page was assembled once, when you built it, and has been sitting at the edge ever since. That difference is most of the speed, and you get it without optimising anything.
A database-driven page
six things have to happen before a byte comes back
~240 ms
VisitorEdgeOrigin serverApplicationDatabaseTemplate renderResponse
Any one of these can be slow. A busy database, a plugin doing too much, a cold cache, a server under load. You inherit the worst of them on every uncached request.
A static page on Rack1
the file already exists, near your visitor
~14 ms
VisitorEdge cacheResponse
Nothing is queried and nothing is rendered while your visitor waits. The edge already has the finished file and hands it straight over.
Time to first byte is just distance
With nothing to compute, response time collapses to how far the packet travels. Our edge network keeps that distance short wherever your visitor happens to be, so the number stays small in Sydney as well as San Antonio.
The speed scores get easier
Time to first byte is the wait between someone asking for your page and the first scrap of it arriving. It sets the floor for everything after it, so keeping it low makes the performance scores search engines grade you on much easier to pass. Static sites tend to manage that without a performance project.
Load barely registers
Serving the same file to ten thousand people costs almost nothing, because it is the same cached file every time. Traffic spikes that would flatten a database-backed site are a quiet afternoon for a static one.
A much smaller attack surface
A site made of files has no admin login to brute-force, no plugin chain to keep current and no application layer to exploit. Most of the ways websites get compromised simply do not apply, and the platform underneath stays patched and monitored by us.
Nothing to warm up
No caches to prime and no cold start to wait out. The first visitor after a quiet night gets exactly the same response as the thousandth visitor at lunchtime.
Predictable, every time
The page a visitor gets is byte-for-byte the page you built and tested. No environment differences and no “it works on my machine”.
Timings are illustrative, based on typical cached edge round trips versus an uncached dynamic request. Your numbers depend on your site and your visitor's connection.
Bring your own generator
Whatever builds it, we'll serve it
Static hosting has no opinion about how the files were made. If your toolchain produces a folder of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and assets, that folder is your website. Here are the generators our customers reach for most, with the command that produces the folder you upload.
Hugo
GoFerociously quick builds, even on sites with tens of thousands of pages. A single binary with no dependency tree to manage.
$ hugo → public/Astro
JavaScriptComponent-driven pages that ship zero JavaScript by default, with islands for the bits that genuinely need it.
$ npm run build → dist/Eleventy
JavaScriptFlexible, unopinionated and refreshingly small. Bring your own templating language and it stays out of the way.
$ npx @11ty/eleventy → _site/MkDocs
PythonThe straightforward way to turn a folder of Markdown into a documentation site. Configured with a single YAML file.
$ mkdocs build → site/Material for MkDocs
PythonThe theme that made MkDocs a serious documentation platform. Search, navigation, versioning and dark mode out of the box.
$ mkdocs build → site/Zensical
PythonThe newer technical-writing toolchain from the team behind Material for MkDocs, aimed at documentation at scale. It is what our own docs site runs on.
$ zensical build → site/Docusaurus
ReactDocumentation and developer portals with versioning, translations and MDX. Built and maintained by Meta.
$ npm run build → build/VitePress
VueVite-powered docs with instant local reloads and a very light production output.
$ npm run docs:build → .vitepress/dist/Jekyll
RubyThe original, still going strong. Enormous theme ecosystem and a format plenty of writers already know.
$ jekyll build → _site/Zola
RustOne fast binary, no runtime dependencies, sensible defaults and a genuinely quick build loop.
$ zola build → public/Next.js
ReactAlready using Next? Set output to export and you get a fully static build with no Node server required.
$ next build → out/SvelteKit
SvelteAdd adapter-static and SvelteKit prerenders the whole site to plain files ready to upload.
$ npm run build → build/Not on the list? It almost certainly still works. Pelican, Gatsby, Nuxt, Quartz, Publii, Middleman, Hexo, Bridgetown or a Makefile and some hand-written HTML all produce exactly what we need.
Deployment
Build it on your machine.
Build it on your machine.
Ship the folder.
There is no build step on our side and nothing to configure. You render the site wherever you like, locally or in CI, and copy the output into your web root. The edge picks up the change from there.
1. Push with Git
Every Static plan includes Git deployment. Add your Rack1 repository as a remote and push your built site to it, or connect an existing repository on GitHub or GitLab.
# one-time: add the repository URL from your
# control panel as a remote
git remote add rack1 REPOSITORY_URL
# build, commit the output, push to publish
hugo
git add public && git commit -m "publish"
git push rack1 main2. Build locally, upload
Run your generator, then drag the output folder into the file manager, or point any SFTP/FTPS client at your account. Cyberduck, FileZilla, WinSCP and Transmit all work.
# build, then mirror the output folder into your web root
lftp -u USERNAME,PASSWORD \
ftps://ftp.example.com -e "
mirror -R --delete ./public /public_html;
quit"3. rsync or scp
Prefer the command line? Where SSH is enabled on your plan, rsync gives you fast
incremental uploads and can prune files you have deleted locally. Your web root is
~/public_html, inside
your home directory.
# note the ~/ : your web root sits inside your
# home directory, not at the root of the server
rsync -avz --delete ./public/ \
you@ssh.example.com:~/public_html/
# or a one-off copy with scp
scp -r ./public/* \
you@ssh.example.com:~/public_html/4. Deploy from your pipeline
Push to your default branch and let CI build and publish. This example uses GitHub Actions with an FTPS upload step, but the shape is identical in GitLab CI, Woodpecker, Drone, Jenkins or a shell script on a schedule. None of it is Rack1-specific, which is the point.
- Keep credentials in secrets. Never commit them. Every CI platform has an encrypted secret store.
- Deploy only the output folder. Point the action at
dist/,public/or_site/, not your whole repository. - Build on a pull request too. Catching a broken build before it merges is cheaper than catching it in production.
- The cache keeps up. Publishing new files invalidates the relevant edge cache automatically, so you are not left purging by hand.
# .github/workflows/deploy.yml
name: Build and deploy
on:
push:
branches: [main]
jobs:
deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
# swap this step for your own toolchain
- uses: actions/setup-node@v4
with:
node-version: "20"
- run: npm ci && npm run build
- name: Upload to Rack1
uses: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@v4.3.5
with:
server: ftp.example.com
username: ${{ secrets.RACK1_USER }}
password: ${{ secrets.RACK1_PASS }}
protocol: ftps
local-dir: ./dist/
server-dir: /public_html/
Security
The attack that never gets started
Almost every website compromise follows the same five steps. It is worth reading them in order, because on a static site the chain breaks at step two and the rest simply cannot happen.
- 1
A bot finds your site
It isn't personal and nobody chose you. Automated scanners sweep the whole internet all day looking for known-vulnerable versions of popular software. Yours came up in a list.
- 2
It looks for a way in
A contact form that accepts attachments. An image resizer that never checked what it was handed. A plugin three versions behind with a public write-up of exactly how to break it.
- On a static site, the story ends here
There is nothing running that accepts what a visitor sends. No login form, no comment box, no upload endpoint, no plugin, no admin panel. Your site is a folder of finished files, and a folder has no opinions and no vulnerabilities. A visitor can ask for your files. There is no code path that lets them change one.
- 3
It writes a file
A small script with a boring name, dropped into a folder full of legitimate files where nobody will look at it twice.
- 4
The server runs it
Now it isn't your website any more. It's a phishing page wearing a bank's logo, a spam relay, or a few hundred pages of pharmacy adverts pointed at Google.
- 5
You find out last
Usually from a browser warning, a blacklist, or a customer asking why your site is offering them something you don't sell.
The only writes are yours
Files on your account change in exactly one circumstance: when you put them there. Over SFTP, over Git, or from your CI pipeline, and every one of those is an authenticated connection you control and can revoke.
There is no second route in. A visitor cannot upload to your site because there is nothing on it that accepts an upload, and that is a property of how the site is built rather than a filter we are hoping catches everything.
Nothing to keep patched
The steady drip of security releases for a CMS, its themes and its plugins is the maintenance burden most site owners quietly fall behind on. It is also how most of them eventually get compromised.
A static site has no such queue. We keep the platform underneath patched, monitored and hardened, and there is no application layer on top of it for you to worry about.
What static hosting does not protect you from
- Your own credentials. If someone gets your SFTP, Git or control panel login, they can publish whatever they like. Use a password manager and turn on every second factor you are offered.
- Third-party JavaScript. Anything you embed from someone else's domain, an analytics tag, a chat widget, a font script, runs in your visitors' browsers with your site's privileges.
- Your build pipeline. A compromised dependency or a leaked CI secret can put bad files into your output folder, and we will serve them faithfully because you published them.
- Your domain. DNS is a separate thing to look after. Keep your registrar account locked down as carefully as your hosting.
Static is a good fit for
- Static site generators (Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, Jekyll)
- Single-page apps and JAMstack front-ends
- Landing pages, docs sites and portfolios
- Campaign microsites that need to survive a traffic spike
Included on every tier
The fastest thing on the internet is a file that's already there.
Whichever tier you pick, you get the whole platform: the edge CDN, Rack1 Burst auto-scaling, daily offsite backups you can restore yourself, free SSL, managed DNS and a control panel that puts it all in one place.
FAQ
Static: common questions
Can I use a database on a static plan?
No. Static plans do not include MySQL, and there is no way to add one. If your site needs a database for a CMS, a store, a forum or a members area, you want our Basic Shared plans, which start at $2.99/month, include MySQL and PHP 8.x, and run on the same edge network. Moving up later is straightforward.
How do I get my files onto the server?
SFTP, or the file manager in our control panel. Point your build output at your web root and publish whenever you like.
Do static plans get the CDN too?
Yes. Every Rack1 plan is delivered through the global edge network with free SSL. Static content is the ideal thing to cache at the edge, so these plans get the most out of it.
Is there a bandwidth limit?
Yes, and it's printed on every tier above, from 250 GB a month on Static Lite up to 5 TB on Static Max. If you get close to it we'll get in touch before anything is restricted.
How quickly will my account be set up?
Usually within a few minutes of your payment clearing. Provisioning is automated, so in the normal case your login details arrive and you can start uploading straight away.
A couple of things finish shortly after the account rather than at the same moment. Your SSL certificate is issued and propagates within about 30 minutes, so the padlock can take a little longer to appear than the account does.
Occasionally an order is flagged for manual review by our automated fraud checks. That is rare, but when it happens somebody looks at it by hand before the account is created, which delays setup. If your account has not appeared shortly after paying, that is almost always why, and you can ask us at any point.
Other plans
Not quite the right fit?
Everything runs on the same platform, so moving between families later is straightforward.
Basic Shared Web Hosting
The dependable everyday plan. A properly managed home for small and medium websites, blogs and small-business sites.
- From 1 website
- From 10 GB NVMe storage
- From 250 GB / month
- Edge CDN + Rack1 Burst included
Accelerated Web Hosting
More headroom, more speed. For sites that have outgrown a starter plan.
- From 10 websites
- From 50 GB NVMe storage
- From 2 TB / month
- Edge CDN + Rack1 Burst included
WordPress Optimized Hosting
WordPress, tuned and staged. A stack shaped around WordPress: caching at three levels so pages get rebuilt as rarely as possible, one-click staging so you can preview every change, and managed core updates.
- 1 WordPress site
- 1 staging environment
- From 15 GB NVMe storage
- Edge CDN + Rack1 Burst included
Start on Static Web Hosting.
Pick a tier, point your domain at us, and the platform takes it from there. Moving up a tier later takes minutes.