I pay less than $10 a year to run this entire site.

No ads.
No page builders.
No surprise scaling bills.

All I paid for was the domain.

The rest runs on Cloudflare’s free tier, GitHub, and 11ty — a static site generator that turns plain text files into a website.

There are plenty of tutorials explaining how to wire all of that together. This isn’t one of them.

This is about why I chose this setup.

As an elder millennial who has always dabbled in web design, hosting used to feel disheartening.

Free hosts plastered banners on your site like a landlord collecting rent. Paid plans nudged you toward monthly subscriptions, bloated WordPress installs, or “AI page builders” that abstracted everything away.

I build this site for fun. For documenting projects. For experimenting. For thinking out loud.

Paying a monthly fee for something that doesn’t directly generate revenue always felt like friction.

Worse, most cloud providers charge per bandwidth or per request. My fear wasn’t paying $5 a month.

It was waking up to a viral spike and a $400 bill.

Cloudflare’s free tier changed that equation.

At the time of writing, they allow static sites up to 200,000 requests per month on the free plan. If I somehow exceed that, they don’t silently charge my card — access simply pauses until I upgrade or the month resets.

No surprise bills.

That alone sold me.

11ty sealed it.

Instead of logging into a dashboard, I write text files.
I push them to GitHub.
Cloudflare builds and deploys automatically.

My website becomes version-controlled. Portable. Simple.

No database. No plugin ecosystem. No mystery layers.

Just files.

It’s not one-click easy — but it’s not rocket science either. If you can write a few text documents and follow a setup guide, you can do this.

Why would Cloudflare offer this for free?

Because if I ever build something that truly scales — a tool, a game, something that crosses that free limit — upgrading is easier than migrating away.

That’s a fair trade.

Until then, I get autonomy for almost nothing.

In a world where personal sites feel extinct, I think they matter more than ever.

You don’t need a business model.
You don’t need 10,000 followers.
You don’t need to monetize anything.

You just need a domain and a corner of the internet that’s yours.

Social media is rented land.
Algorithms decide what gets seen.
You curate a persona inside someone else’s system.

A personal site is different.

No feed.
No engagement farming.
No algorithm deciding your reach.

Just you.

If you’ve ever thought, “I wish I had my own space online,” this is your sign.

It doesn’t have to be complicated.
It doesn’t have to be expensive.
It just has to be yours.