I now pay $5 a month with nginx on Linode/Cloudflare. If you pay for this out of your own pocket and your site doesn't make any money, consider bandwidth/data costs first.
If you store 1 GB of data in total in us-east-1 and serve 1 request per second with an average size of 100 KB, it would cost $1.28 per month[1] for S3 and $25.38 for CF without the free tier, $20.24 total with the free tier. That's much more than most static websites ever store and ever serve. I use S3 & CloudFront for multiple static websites (all low-traffic, < 50 pages with some images) and the cost per site for hosting is less than I pay to renew its domain each year.
I used to do these by hand and finally started using Hugo a few years ago, and love the solution. Everything is simple to set up, the SSL cert is free and auto-renewed, the performance is great and the costs are negligible. For the vast majority of small static websites and even up to thousands of page views a day I find this approach ideal. (obligatory: I am not affiliated with Amazon in any way, just a happy customer).
[1] on https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html — S3 page -> Standard, Storage: 1GB, GET: 2628000 requests, returned: 262.8 GB. CloudFront page -> Data transfer out: 262.8 GB, Average object size: 100 KB.
(high quality images and videos, combined with a viral page)