You're reading a static HTML page served by Nginx on a six-euro-a-month Debian box. No Squarespace. No Netlify. No Vercel. No build minutes, no bandwidth tiers, no vendor asking me to upgrade to Pro for features I don't need.
This isn't a flex. It's just a website, and it costs almost nothing to run. The point is that hosting your own site is absurdly easy and gives you something increasingly rare on the internet: a space that nobody else controls. No algorithm decides who sees it. No terms of service can take it down because someone reported it. It's just files on a server you pay for, served to anyone who asks.
Get a cheap cloud server. Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, whatever. Install Nginx:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginxUpload your files. You can scp them, rsync them, or set up git-based deploys if you want to be fancy about it:
scp -r /local-path-to-your-site/* user@your-server-ip:/var/www/html/Make sure Nginx can read them:
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/Reload Nginx:
sudo systemctl reload nginxDone. You have a website. Point a domain at the server, set up some security headers, and you've got something that will outlast most SaaS platforms while costing you less per month than a coffee.
You can. They work fine. But every platform is a dependency, and dependencies have a habit of changing their pricing, shutting down, or deciding your content violates some policy you didn't read. Your own server doesn't have opinions about your content. It just serves files. That simplicity is the whole point.
Plus, once you have a server, you can run other things on it. A VPN. Automated backups. Whatever you want. It's your box.