There are few VPS services for $1/month, but if you pay slightly more, like 2-3 USD/month, or have patience to wait for a campaign, or are prepared to pay two years upfront, you will get a high quality vps service, and can expect the same uptime as the major cloud services. If you can afford another 1-3 dollars per month, get an additional VPS on another network, and set up round robin DNS for load balancing. Which for 2-6 USD per month gives you almost close to 100% uptime. And 1-2 TB monthly bandwidth. 1-2 vCPU cores and 256 MB memory is more then enough to handle a static web site.

I'm just a customer ... it is very legit but it is a bit like ebay and amazon so of course the quality varies.

It's legit. Not a scam. I have no idea how Netlify can offer so much in their free tier, but they do. They are likely to get bought out by a Cloudflare, etc, at some point, so time will tell if the free tier will remain so feature-full.