From hosting service point of view, there is a big difference. For you, the customer. If you run a CMS (Joomla, WordPress, etc) and everything goes smooth, your super secure server stays online forever and you never need to worry - fine. Then it really doesn’t matter. But what if the worst happens? What of the database gets hacked? What if you didn’t back it up and it crashed? What if your old host went down and your new web hosting doesn’t allow SQL or limits it usage OR on whatever server you are, the database went unstable so it’s temporarily unavailable? In fact, there are countless “if’s” when we talk about SQL-based sites. Your hosting service sometimes cannot guarantee its stability and you cannot do a thing beside sitting and waiting for your website to come back online.

HTML pages, however, avoid all this headache. You need no knowledge installing the database, configuring the users, the strings, breaking your neck studying the aspects of php…HTML website can be made in NotePad, with minimum knowledge and easily uploaded through file manager to the server. You do not need to look for a host that supports scripts, allows databases and provides them free (yes, I personally saw sites that allow MySQL installations for an additional fee.)

The biggest problem arises if you need to move your website from one host to another. Back up the database, installing it on the new server, downtime is inavatiable as dynamic content must be stopped from functioning, otherwise you lose data (happened to me when moving a forum), and when you are done and put the site back online… The likelihood of seeing a devastating “database error” on your screen is pretty big. HTML will never do it to you. You can move it from host to host every day, avoiding downtimes, errors and wasted time trying to fix them.

Having said that, I must add that I am currently moving all my sites from html to CMS, because… well, it’s easier to maintain on a daily basis.