People who manage small websites, how much does it cost you in time (and finances)?

I'm paying about USD 35 per year for shared hosting and USD 10 per year per dotcom domain name :) I'm maintaining 3 domain names currently, and these 3 websites are all using that same shared hosting. They do not consume much space or bandwidth. This is for my portfolio websites and I'm pretty bad at updating them, I maybe update once a year or so. Here's an example, my gamedev website: mellowminx.com - it's made with super basic html and css, I probably spent less than an hour on it.

Edit: In case anyone else wanted to know, I'm using Hostinger for shared hosting and Porkbun for domain registration. Porkbun is nice and straightforward. Hostinger suffers from the same issue that many other webhosts do-- they lure you in with low pricing, but it's only for the initial period and will renew at a higher price (listed in tiny text). I find it super annoying, but almost all webhosts are like this, and Hostinger still does have cheap pricing for my needs (PHP, FTP, SSL, email, small websites, low bandwidth) even after renewal.

I run https://quotable.raybetter.com on a single instance in the Hetzner cloud for about $8/mo plus a few dollars a year in s3 costs for backups and the cost of the domain. Auth0 has a free tier which I use to manage sign in authentication.

I have reincarnated my quote database in different platforms over the years as a learning exercise for the platform, so this one is deployed as a vue.js front end, a Golang back end, and a postures database. This stack is overkill for the functionality, so I could probably run it more cheaply as a statically generated website, but it was an exercise in learning this particular tech stack.

I don't have any specific strategy for monetization. I have been thinking about setting up an integration with some print on demand platform to offer merch but haven't gotten around to it. For my own use, I cut quotes into vinyl to out on my water bottles, but the weeding is way too time consuming to be profitable if done by hand.

Edit to add: I did not answer the how much time question. Now that it is stable, I spend almost no time maintaining it and around an hour a month adding quotes to it as I find them. I probably spent 60-80 hours on it at the start.

I self-host my blog with Digital Ocean. It could be $5/month but I want a bit more memory so that a remote connection to VSC (which runs on the remote server) doesn't lag as much, so I pay $10/month. Domain is $9/year. I also have a couple subdomains with React SPAs hosted with Github Pages, which is free (other than the cost of the domain). If I really wanted to, I think I could host my blog that way too, but the UX would be worse and the #1 most important thing is for writing to be as easy as possible, so I've never really looked into it.

I run a handful of very low traffic static and WordPress websites, some of which are personal, some are communities, some brands and company websites that I'm part of. Currently, they are all running on AWS's Lightsail instances, which I have found simple and straightforward to deal with. Some of them are in their own individual $5 / month WordPress instances, while a bunch of my personal projects are together in a more generic $5 / month Linux instance. On top of that, there are the domain fees, in my case somewhere between $10 and $30 / year, depending on the domain and the registrar.

The static websites require no real maintenance, and all backups are automated, but with the WordPress sites I do monthly manual updates that take me about 10 minutes / website, including running OS updates and rebooting the servers if necessary. One of the communities is also moderately targeted by spammers, so I log in every couple of days to remove a bunch of spam messages, none of which ever make it to the public website, but I like to keep things clean.

All websites are constantly targeted by bot attacks, and one of the company websites in particular can get thousands of attempts a day. I started running websites towards the end of the 90s, and the amount of crap that you have to think about because of bots is one of the biggest changes that has happened in my time. It's worth reading into how to tighten website security. It's a time investment that will pay off in the long run.

I host a few websites. I pay for the domain names and my parents help keep the internet on at the house - they run from a RPi, I haven't had a problem with processing power yet.

Been running my own blog as an independent website since 2001 using my custom written blog platform. Currently host it on a Debian shared VM at Linode / Akamai which costs me 24 USD a month (a bit overkill but I like having access to more resources than I need, just in case).

I'm a firm believer in personal blogs. Carve out your own corner of the web if you want to ensure that you'll always have a place to express yourself.

https://jaylittle.com/

EDIT: Realized I skipped the time aspect of the question. This takes very little time on my part. The blog platform is pretty mature and does what I need it to do. Debian requires very little upkeep until I need to perform a major upgrade and even that it's only a few hours of my time. Backups and updates are scripted jobs so I don't manually deal with any of that.

So the vast majority of my time is spent on content rather than the technical aspects of the thing.

EDIT 2: Keep forgetting that Akamai recently raised their prices... so I corrected my monthly hosting cost

I host multiple small sites.
$14 for.com Domains - https://namesilo.com

$10 - $20 month Hosting https://www.vultr.com/

Many hosting sites are cheap but slow. Vultr is both cheap and fast.

I host myself. It costs me around 150€ on electric bill per year, another 150€ on internet connection amd some time on maintenance of the server (software side). I pay for one domain, which is like 6-10€ depending on current price and for how long I pay for it.

I would provide link, but there is nothing to see. I use it for OpenVPN and for my offsite backup. I run a blog for some time which I programmed in PHP myself. One day I had some problem with MySQL database and never got to fixing it... I will have to move the server physically in near future - actually I built new machine and now have to deploy it. I may look into the website itself while doing that.

Don't want to link to it for identity protection reasons, but I run a tiny blog on Netlify with a static site generator and the only cost is the domain name (which also gets use as my business/professional email).

I like this approach because it's extremely low-maintenance; no need to keep Linux, nginx, etc patched, no WordPress to worry about keeping up to date to ward off exploit bots, and putting up a new blog post is as easy as pushing changes to a private GitHub repo. It also means my blog posts are in a plain text format (Markdown) that's easy to move between platforms, and it gets me usage of Netlify's CDNs to make everything extra zippy regardless of where readers are located.

I charge my users €15/month for an account with 40gb space, 400gb traffic, a dedicated IPv4 address, DNS, control panel and light management (keeping things up to date and helping here and there, such as by telling Microsoft for the 500th time to for the love of God stop blocking people's e-mail for no reason).