It isn’t just free. It’s effectively anonymous.

Most hosting (eg AWS) requires you to say who you are, provide a lot of ID. I think some don’t at first (eg Azure, Hetzner) but eventually you need to pay via a credit card, include your actual name etc.

With Cloudflare, you literally only need an email address. It continues to be free.

The second best is Hostinger, where you can pay with crypto.

Github pages is great too, but you don’t really get all the power to customize your own website.

> I think some don’t at first (eg Azure, Hetzner)

What, Hetzner requires sending the image of a passport or other photo ID just to open an account (as a U.S. customer), unless they relaxed that in the past few years. They’re among the worst, or just the worst since I don’t recall another provider doing that.

And enough control to keep a privacy promise. My evening project is a free, no-signup web app on Pages. A _headers file gives me a strict CSP, so I can say "exactly two remote origins" on the privacy page and anyone can verify it in devtools. Redirects, a custom domain, static files plus one API origin, zero cost for over a year. The product has no business model, so without that free tier it simply would not exist.