You answered that yourself:
> It costs less than $10/month
That’s a lot of dollars for a static website. There are a myriad of free options and there have been for years. Kinda disappointing that they weren’t mentioned. Anyone wanting to deploy a static website knows the big 4, completely free: Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, GitHub Pages.
Remember I've been using this for 13 years, and if it keeps on working the same way, I'll use it for another 13 easily. (I've hosted multiple sites on it over the years)
The current page claims it's $3.95 a month if you pay yearly: https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/shared/
I thought mine was more like $8 but I honestly don't remember. It's a fair price for steady service IMO
Just a guess from outside, but Microsoft is likely to be sustainable even if you use GitHub Pages to serve your static site on a free account.
It's more that some product manager or VP will notice this free service and want to attach their strings to it.
Having worked in big tech, it happens very often. Google Groups is a famous example at Google (among many). It was way better 15 years ago, but it just wasn't "worth it" to keep the lights on in its current state, so it shuffled through a series of product managers/teams who wanted to "improve" it.
Microsoft has a long history of this as well. I feel like this is another generational thing -- people forgot what Microsoft used to be like, and how their free products turned hostile. So far Github is OK, but I'm sure glad there are alternatives.
I prefer to just pay money to a company that provides a service, and I hope they profit from that. That incentives should be aligned. So far with Dreamhost that has worked out exactly as expected.
If I had spent any time migrating to the latest and greatest thing in the last 13 years, that would have easily burned the money I have saved by using a free service.
e.g. I have hosted sites on other platforms that are now down and useless, as I'm sure many others here have.
When I checked Dreamhost several years ago, I found that it was also an oversold service that relied on most customers using way less than the promised capacity. This doesn’t mean that it’s bad at hosting websites, but it’s not something I wanted to pay for.
So I hosted my websites with Nearly Free Speech (NFSN), where hosting is actually by what you consume. For small static sites, you could get a lot more mileage with NFSN and still not pay more than a couple of dollars a month. It’s a lot cheaper than your Dreamhost plan, and is truly sustainable because NFSN gets very close to recovering its costs plus a little more to sustain, grow and become better. NFSN also doesn’t have tricks like referral programs and other special discounts, unlike Dreamhost (talking from what I’ve seen about Dreamhost in the past).
The major downside is it doesn’t have cPanel and fancy application installers. But that shouldn’t be an issue for people who would use scp to setup web pages on a host.
My point was that shared hosting exists, is good, and is the right solution to this problem. My point was not that you should use Dreamhost :)
I tried NearlyFreeSpeech a few years ago; some sibling comments describe my experiences
Worst case scenario you pay a few cents to host on S3 and stick any free-range CDN on it.
I categorically refuse to use any non-static hosting for static content. Your shared hosting runs code and can be compromised, especially if you host multiple software/sites on it.
And if you somehow find a loophole you'll quickly become persona non grata.
As the saying goes, TANSTAAFL.
There are also community hosting networks offering different kind of hosting services for a small sum / year. Here is an example of such a network mostly france based but I am sure there are same kind of initiatives all over the world: https://www.chatons.org
On a side note, I'm wondering if one can host one site simultaneously on e. g. Netlify and Vercel and load-balance those (for example, with round-robin DNS) to stay within free limits for longer.
.com is around ~10$/year, email server is included in practically all shared hosting, and basically every shared hosting offers free TLS via Let's Encrypt (or some other provider.)