Why I Went With Free Hosting Instead of AWS

When you’re running a personal site, blog, or portfolio, you don’t need enterprise-grade infrastructure. GitHub Pages plus a custom domain gets you free static hosting, free HTTPS, and a git-based publishing workflow — no servers to patch, no bills to watch.

This post walks through why static hosting is the right call for most personal sites, and when you’d actually reach for something like AWS or Cloudflare Workers instead (spoiler: only once you need server-side logic, databases, or heavier compute).

The tradeoff

Static hosting trades flexibility for simplicity. You give up dynamic server-side rendering, but you gain zero maintenance, zero cost, and a deploy pipeline that’s just git push.

For 90% of personal sites and blogs, that tradeoff is a clear win.