alt Hacker NewsPersonally I have used GitHub pages and cloudflare pages for hosting static sites and have been very happy with them considering the zero cost involved.
I don't think there is much difference between paying nearlyfreespeech (which I have done in the past) Vs using GitHub or cloudflare - you are still reliant on a third party for actual hosting. I don't really see any value in self-hosting myself - apart from nerdy satisfaction etc, I don't see the need.
The important part in my mind is the fact that I am manually controlling the assets - the HTML the images etc. Simple files on disk.
The git integration with GitHub and cloudflare though is obviously a huge boon though as now I have an off-site backup, and publishing is even more seamless than the old FTP/sftp days - just push to master from within vscode where you are editing the files anyway and it'll be live in 30 seconds (as well as backed up).
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When you pay for something, you stop being the product and become the customer instead. That's a big deal.
Same, but with GitLab pages.
I do the same for my blog [1]
A huge advantage of GH / CF is that your site has a strong chance of outliving you, if that's something you care about.
If you're self hosting, either at home or on a VPS, you have to worry about domains expiring and credit cards being cancelled, which is inevitably going to happen if you don't have a succession plan in place. You could probably solve it with a bunch of lawyering, but that's expensive.
Free services don't have this problem. They can still go away, it's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a "might" versus a "definitely will"