Self host isn't that bad. Say you have a raspberry pi. Install linux on the pi (basically the only thing to do with it), then google how to set up a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php/python). Once you've followed all the steps they list then now you have a web server. To get it out on the internet log into your router and port forward for HTTP and now anyone can see that glorious Apache default web page.

Then for a domain just find the first domain register and buy the domain from them. Once you own a domain point it towards your IP address (just google what is my IP) and you're set.

Your web page is now on the internet and anyone can type a nice name to get to your page. Anyone can also use any exploits then find so you have to make sure you're keeping up updating your devices. And every port you forward is an intrusion point into your network should someone want to hack you.

For hosting check out something like github pages. There several other free ones as well, but pages looks like the easiest to set up. If you want something more robust, you could look into Netlify or Vercel, but that's gonna require a little more know-how.

It depends on how fancy of a website you are trying to make. But check out something like Hugo or Jekyll. I haven’t used Jekyll personally but have used Hugo. There are plenty of templates to get you started depending the type of content you are planning on putting up.

And the best part is you can host the site for free on GitHub or Gitlab, so the domain name is the only cost.

First off, it's important to understand Responsive Design and why you shouldn't be writing your own css these days as a newbie. Bootstrap is a public css doc with a lot of those problems pre-solved, so you might want to look up some of their tooling.

As far as a website: you'll need a domain name, you can get some for free, but they usually have short renewals otherwise this is unavoidable.

You can pay for "shared hosting" at any of the major vendors like blue host or GoDaddy and get apache or aspx file hosting for like you said $X0/year.

You can use an s3 static website for ~free. Creating a DNS hosted zone is $.50. but you can create an s3 bucket (think flash drive in the cloud) store a threshold of free documents, and publish them as a website all within the free tier of AWS. This has some technical background and AWS can get expensive of you make mistakes (although this shouldn't scale much unless you upload a thousands ton of files repeatedly)

Alternatively you can use GitHub pages . Git is a tool used by developers to share and edit code, they let you publish free HTML as well, but requires learning git or figuring out a tool with a UI like source tree. I don't think you can use custom domains with this though.

Although if you have any interest in tech, you can also create a free nginx docker container through a lot of services like ecs, but you can also self host in a "sandbox". Docker creates a mini virtual machine with all of the code required to run self contained. Nginx let's you create HTML docker containers by mounting a directory. ~ docker start nginx /website/directory And it just runs self contained.

You could give a flat file CMS like Grav a shot. It's basically like a wiki system for running a site. There's also a slow burn up a hill of complexity where you do LAMP with PHP then you gravitate to things like express.js then Electron and then you roll poorly on your sanity check and end up naked in a bell tower.

Insert that bell curve meme where it's wordpress on both sides.

For self hosting, pick up docker and understand that then go for portainer - it makes making mistakes in the arena super easy to scrub away. I suggest Synology NAS.