[jussij]

> It just seems wrong that I can't just buy a domain and get some random content on it without having Go Daddy charge me $5/month to host it?

In order to host any web page requires a machine to serve up the web content and that machine needs to be running 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

So at a minimum, running that machine requires a safe place to house it, electricity to run it and people to keep an eye on it just to make sure it is still running.

All of those tasks cost money.

[dmortin]

Heroku, Netlify, AppEngine, Firebase, etc. lots of possibilities to host a personal site completely free.

[richardw]

Serving from S3 with Cloudflare adds tiny marginal cost to both of those companies. I moved a few static sites to that setup. Cost is in compute, storage, etc. not hosting static pages.

[dmortin]

For static sites Firebase is quite good. You get a global CDN by default and the free plan is enough for most personal purposes.