The $15/year web presence

This is the guide the whole site is built around. By the end you’ll know exactly what to buy (one thing), what to set up (two things), and what it costs: about CA$15/year (Spaceship bills in Canadian dollars if you want — no exchange-rate surprises; Americans, it’s about US$10/year).

The recipe

Piece	What we use	Cost
Domain	Spaceship — .com or .ca	~CA$13–15/yr (US$9–10)
Hosting	Cloudflare Pages	$0
HTTPS certificate	included with Cloudflare	$0
The website itself	built with AI help (guide)	$0

Compare that to the “default” path — a GoDaddy domain renewing at C$32.99 (US$22.99) plus a Wix plan at US$17/month — and you’re looking at CA$320+ (US$250+) every year for the same result. Over five years, that difference buys a very nice piece of equipment for your actual business.

Proof this isn’t theoretical: the site you’re reading right now runs on this exact stack.

Who this is for (an honest filter)

This recipe fits you if your website is a brochure: what you do, where you are, when you’re open, photos of your work, how to get in touch. That describes most local service businesses, consultants, trades, clinics, restaurants that don’t do online ordering, and portfolios.

It’s not for you if you need online sales with inventory (see the e-commerce guide), or you want to visually redesign your site from your phone every week (a builder might be worth it).

Step 1: Buy your domain (10 minutes)

1. Go to Spaceship and search for the name you want.
2. Canadians: seriously consider .ca — Canadians click it more, and it costs about the same. If both .ca and .com are free, grabbing both for ~CA$28/yr (US$19) total is cheap brand insurance. (More on choosing.) Prefer a Canadian company that bills only in CAD? CanSpace is a great .ca registrar too — just know that as a Canadian company they add sales tax at checkout, which makes Spaceship (no tax charged) slightly cheaper all-in.
3. At checkout: decline every add-on. You don’t need their hosting, email trial, or SSL. WHOIS privacy is already free — and it matters: it keeps your name and phone number out of the public domain registry, which is exactly where the “final notice” renewal-scam letters and SEO cold calls harvest their targets.

Why Spaceship and not GoDaddy? Because of the renewal price you’ll pay every year after. Why not Cloudflare’s own registrar? It’s also excellent (at-cost pricing) — but it can’t hold a domain you register elsewhere first without a transfer, has no support to speak of, and doesn’t sell .ca. Spaceship is the better first-registrar for non-technical owners; we say this as people who’d earn nothing recommending Cloudflare and something recommending Spaceship — the reasoning is in the open.

Step 2: Get a website (an afternoon)

You need a folder of website files. In 2026 you don’t need to hire anyone for a brochure site: Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini will build you a genuinely good one from a plain-English description of your business. We wrote the exact prompts to use: Build your website with AI.

(Already have a site trapped in Wix or Squarespace? The same AI process rebuilds it — point the AI at your current site and ask it to recreate the content as a static site.)

Step 3: Put it online with Cloudflare Pages (30 minutes)

Cloudflare Pages hosts static sites free — unlimited bandwidth, global speed, HTTPS included, no ads, no “upgrade” nagging that matters. Full walkthrough: Deploy your site to Cloudflare Pages, including pointing your Spaceship domain at it.

The set-and-forget upgrade: put your site’s folder in a free private GitHub repository and connect it to Cloudflare Pages. From then on, every time you (or the AI helping you) save a change to GitHub, Cloudflare publishes it automatically — no dragging and dropping, and GitHub keeps a full history of every version of your site as a bonus backup. The deploy guide covers both paths; this site itself updates exactly this way.

The receipt

Spaceship .com renewal ....... CA$14.30/yr   (US$9.98)
Cloudflare Pages ............. CA$0.00
HTTPS, CDN, bandwidth ........ CA$0.00
GitHub (private repo) ........ CA$0.00
─────────────────────────────────────────────
Total ........................ ~CA$15/yr     (~US$10)

What about email?

you@yourbusiness.com is the natural next step and costs about CA$1.10–9.50/month per person (US$1–7) depending on needs — compare the options or jump to the setup guide. Even doing nothing, free email forwarding gets mail sent to your domain into your existing inbox.

Updating your site later

Your site is a folder of files you own. To change your hours or add photos: ask the same AI to make the edit, then redeploy — drag-and-drop if you upload manually, or automatic the moment you save the change if you connected GitHub in Step 3. No subscription hostage-taking — and if some day you outgrow static, your domain simply gets pointed at whatever you move to. Nothing is ever locked in.