Free hosting. Free SSL. Finished website.

Yes — building and previewing your Zarla site is free, indefinitely. There's no credit card to start, no time-limited trial, and no "free for 14 days" countdown. You only pay when you decide to publish your site on a custom domain — and at that point a plan starts at a few dollars a month. Hosting, SSL, CDN and Core Web Vitals optimisation are included on every paid plan; we never charge extra for them.

While you're designing, editing, and previewing the site, yes — Zarla hosts the preview for free on Google Cloud with SSL. To take the site live on your own custom domain (yourbusiness.com instead of a Zarla preview URL), you'll need a paid plan. That's the only paywall. Most small-business owners build and refine for free for days or weeks before flipping the switch.

It depends what "best" means. If best = lowest possible cost and you can build the site yourself with HTML/PHP, InfinityFree is genuinely $0 forever. If best = you want the site BUILT for you on a fast, secure host and you don't mind paying a few dollars a month once you go live, Zarla is the better fit — the AI generates the entire site, the hosting is on Google Cloud, and you don't pay until you publish on a custom domain.

On Google Cloud — the same global cloud infrastructure that powers Spotify, Snap, and a large share of the internet. Files are served from a global CDN with 200+ edge locations, so a visitor in London loads from London and a visitor in Sydney loads from Sydney. Free SSL certificates, HTTPS, and DDoS protection are configured automatically.

Yes. Every Zarla site — free preview or published — comes with a free SSL certificate that auto-renews. There's no setup step, no "install SSL" upgrade, and no third-party Let's Encrypt configuration. Visitors see the padlock; Google rewards the page with better rankings; nothing to do on your end.

Never. Zarla doesn't inject banner ads, popups, or affiliate links onto your site. That's how some old-school free hosts subsidise their service — Zarla's revenue comes from paid publishing plans, so your site is your business, not somebody else's billboard.

Fast enough to score 100/100 on Google's PageSpeed Insights SEO category, with a 0.8-second Largest Contentful Paint on a real customer site (manaracare.com.au — verifiable). Modern image formats, lazy loading, font preload, and a global CDN are on by default. You don't need to know what any of those words mean; Zarla configures them for you.

Yes — connecting a custom domain (yourbusiness.com) is the moment Zarla flips from free to paid. Plans start at a few dollars per month and include the domain connection, removal of any Zarla preview URL, and ongoing hosting on Google Cloud. You can buy a domain inside Zarla or bring one you already own.

It keeps loading. Zarla sites scale automatically on Google Cloud — a TV mention, a viral post, or a Google Business Profile that suddenly ranks won't take your site down. You won't get a "your site exceeded the bandwidth limit" email; you'll just get more customers.

The catch is that the site is free to build but a plan starts the day you publish on a custom domain. Plans begin at a few dollars per month. There's no other catch — no surprise upgrade, no "your free hosting just got slower," no forced ads, no time limit on the build phase, and no credit card to get started.