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.