Same reason people buy land and build a house on it: It is in their control. If I host my content on some plattform, I have to bow to their TOS/Tracking/Changes and am more like a tolerated tennant. But they are the HOA that can tell me what they want and do not want regarding content, frontend and backend. I also most possible have to allow them to use my work for their own benefit. If it is free, maybe they profit from you.

People do not get that having your own URL, your own Email and your own Websites, was the most common thing in the past. I staked my claim like the settlers going west. I own my acre of digital Land. I am free to do what ever I want on my property and nobody can take it away as long as I pay 5$ a year for the domain. That is 50$ in 10 years. That is 400$ for my whole life. For a place that I call mine. My digital Landscape. This is my space. There are many spaces out there, but this is the acre I am gonna develop.

Of course I could rent a room in the city by giving away my privacy or the control. And there are many good reasons to do this. But having your own piece of the internet is what makes me feeling more like a part of that net and not just be a cow in someone else shed.

If you're not the customer, you're the product.

Free hosting has been a thing for a long time. I remember having some free PHP4/MySQL hosting and they gave you like 50MB of storage space for your stuff 20 years ago.

GitHub pages and others all have some terms saying what you can and can't host using their services. It makes sense for Intel as it's an open-source project and fits GitHub's goals. People can contribute to the website on GitHub, and when the PRs are merged it gets deployed automatically.

If you're any sort of serious about your online presence, it makes sense to pay for hosting because that comes with more features, support, and certain guarantees about performance and uptime. If your business relies on it, even if it's just a static site with your phone number and email on it, why not throw in that $5/mo on a VPS or a hosting company that's contractually bound to provide the service to a certain level?

If everyone used free hosting whenever they can, it would become too expensive to run and provide for free. Most hosting providers that provide a free tier use it as a lure for you to grow into their paid offerings. Like, basic Cloudflare is free but downloads and video streaming through their free tier is technically against ToS. You need a paid plan to do that, and get more caching capacity, more uptime guarantees (CF basically rolls things to free tier first as if it breaks, it doesn't affect paid customers so you're doing free testing for them).

Free tier makes sense for individuals to learn and stuff, and I greatly appreciate having had access to free hosting for a solid 10 years. But I've moved on, I can afford my own servers, and there's nobody to go under and shut down the service or tell me I have too much traffic and kick me out. You get what you pay for, after all.

Because lots of people are stuck with CMSs like Wordpress and need to have nginx/PHP/MySQL running somewhere.

In order to use something like GitHub Pages, you need a proper deployment pipeline, which a regular person won’t be able to set up.

You're basically paying for a storage locker to keep the website files in whenever nobody's looking at them, and also the delivery service that will show the website files to a user when they are looking at it, you can get around it by self hosting but if you're looking at paid hosting it's probably because you looked up how to self host and had a panic attack

• Control

• ip number reputation

Marketing and analytics.

Every website you visit is doing so much tracking and analytics like where your screen is focused, where your mouse is, what link is clicked. Git and CF pages are generally flat markup pages that don't provide that kind of information.

plus if I host the page myself, I know what the stack is doing and can control the changes. While Github and CF pages are up to the whim of providers for features.