Okay!!!

TL:DR; Don’t pay for a domain name. Don’t pay for hosting. It’ll teach you stuff but is annoying to maintain!

Use GitHub Pages. Or .carrd.co. It’s free. It’s simple. It works. It doesn’t cost $144/year. The build system is simple. It’s hard to mess up. And you can literally copy my site, or someone else’s.

I’ve gone through many different iterations of this:

2019: Custom HTML.
2020: ^^
2021: Hugo + GitHub Pages.
2022: Hugo with a custom theme.
2023: ReactJS custom site.
2024: ^^
2025: Back to Hugo + GitHub Pages.

Just…paying for a domain name is not worth it. And paying for custom hosting (because ReactJS is NOT STATIC!!) is also not worth it.

I’m happy to host this site on GitHub Pages for free. It costs far less, it’s simpler, etc.

If you want a custom domain, just set up an A record to point to GitHub Pages.