[truckerbill]

That's the tradeoff between using a platform and doing things manually. The underlying architecture that things rely on generally can't be changed to be drastically simpler to use due to network effects. You can't make breaking changes to TCP/IP for example or the modern world would implode (or realistically, that new branch would be ignored). So you rely on platforms to hide this complexity.

Digital Ocean probably has a one-click droplet for a static server you could use.

[Frost1x]

Agreed. The question is if you need the complexity these platforms have. Do you need a distributed platform with regional load balancing and all sorts of other stuff to share a small text file with a handful of people? Absolutely not.

It ultimately depends on the usecase. Small web hosts still exist, you can also still stand up a personal fileserver at home in many cases and host a file to a few people. Heck you can even email some files or host it as a torrent.

If you need millions of people to see it and want it to be nearly guaranteed to survive with 99.99999... SLAs then yes, you probably do need all that platform complexity.

Some of these platforms make it relatively easy. S3 isn't too bad to get up to speed with for a quick sort of file hosting strategy.