Although Pinata offers a SaaS service where you pay them monthly to pin and they charge for bandwidth, web3.storage lets you pin 1 Tib for free and without bandwidth metering. So I pinned there, and then got the hash and found the gateway+cdn with low ping time and just concatenate the url, which I hardcode in the frontend

note, I append ?filename=filename.extension to the url to keep track of which hash is what

ironically Pinata is also a gateway that will show any hash for free

then I just deploy the whole project/frontend/backend to github and that auto deploys to netlify and the domain name routes to that instance