These days shared hosting with multiple tenants is more commonly known as "serverless". A bit of a misnomer since servers are involved, but it's the common term.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing
Shared hosting is usually much more straightforward in many ways, including flat-rate pricing.
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- Monthly or yearly billing vs hourly (as the sibling mentioned). I think my plan is $9/month or something, plus $16/year for domain name.
- Single server vs. multiple servers. AWS Lambda is great if you actually need to scale up, but you don't need that for serving a website. A single machine can serve hundreds of static websites.
- You can get commodity shared hosting from dozens of providers, but you can get serverless from only a few "big cloud" providers, which goes against the ethos of the small web. That's because writing and maintaining the custom software to scale up is a big undertaking.
The original post is talking about static websites. You don't need anything running on the server for this! So all you need is shared hosting, and you won't even use the PHP part.