Making and hosting your very own, homegrown website requires very few resources. The most taxing part for me was simply the time I spent reading documentation to learn HTML and CSS.
VS Code is the free, open-source code editor I used to create the HTML pages and CSS stylesheet. Creating an HTML file is as simple as opening a new file in your code editor and pasting in the HTML boilerplate code. Your homepage's HTML file should be named "index.html." You can preview your pages as you write them by using an extension called "Live Preview." You can also click on the local file and it will open in your default web browser.
Cloudflare Pages provides free hosting to static webpages. If you're looking to make something like my website, with simple pages and menus, your website is probably "static." I also used Cloudflare to purchase my wonderful daltonbantz.com domain name, which costs about $10 a year. This should be the only thing that you have to pay for if you want a website with a custom domain name.
(Quick aside: Don't waste time trying to find the "cheapest" domain vendor. Cloudflare and its contemporaries don't mark up the price of registering a domain. You're really not even paying them for the domain; you're paying the fees to register it that everyone has to pay.)
After you've set all that up, you can quite easily connect a Github repository filled with your files to your host of choice, or even just upload the folder directly to the host.
The fonts used for this website are "Inter Tight," which is one of the many stylish and free-to-use Google Fonts, and "Georgia," which is a standard, web-safe font that comes standard with any operating system. If you want to have a custom font with your website, check out the @font-face CSS property. It's really easy to apply.
Everything else is just HTML and CSS, which you will only learn by trying yourself! You can take inspiration from anywhere. I used this image as my jumping-off point:
Your website can be whatever you want it to be (as long as the content is legal). No longer must we be constrained to the homogenized, corporate, subscription-based website builders of yesterday. Learn your HTML and CSS, and claim your piece of internet real estate today!