They probably get you in bandwidth fees over X amount. It would cost pennies for a small scale virtual server with big numbers as the hardware is shared, it would spend most of the time not doing anything. They could set up a machine and oversell a tier like that and make it all back with profit on their first bill.
You can sign up here, and it comes with 200GB of storage and 10TB of monthly bandwidth. And apparently a $300 credit, that wasn't around when I signed up.
That’s not bad at all gonna have to check it out. I host my site on digital ocean it’s on the smallest single core 1gb ram droplet. I run crowdsec and nginx and a couple other little things and it sits around 40% ram usage. Costs 6$ a month and I added 4 weeks worth of automatic weekly backups for $1.50 a month.
I can deal with $7.50 for a little static web server.
They do offer a free $200/60 day credit if you get in with one of the free Linux Foundation cloud classes which is plenty to play with.
FWIW, if all you have is a truly static website (html, css, and js), then GitHub Pages is free and you can point a custom domain there from your registrar, and don’t have to worry about backups or server uptime.
