The biggest costs are not the money, but the work and cognitive load of the thousand cuts it takes to not only bring all of this up, but keep it running, not to mention migrating the content.

However/also, "only" $12 to some is a considerable amount of money to others.

If its a static or client-side website, GitHub Pages is free and allows you to use whatever domain you have already own. Almost all of the websites I run are hosted on GitHub Pages. No maintenance required, and updates are as easy as `git push`.