There are many website and blog builders, some with free hosting or the first year's domain thrown in. These are paid for by adverts appearing on your website which can be turned off by upgrading to a paid plan.
“adfreesites.com” builds websites/blogs/portfolios that are permanently cost-free and ad-free. Content can be deployed independently on separate TEST and LIVE domains
The Content Management System (CMS) at the heart of the builder is zero-cost because it combines multiple “Always Free” web and media hosting services connected through secure API calls handled by an “Always Free” database.
Users build their content in the CMS database and typically deploy it first on a test sub-domain. Details of each page visited are automatically sent back to the CMS where the user can review overall website activity and performance in real-time.
A contact form can be included on any website page - details are emailed automatically to the website's designated contact email address. Messages are received authenticated, signed by “adfreesites.com”.
In order to deploy websites on purchased domains, users must subscribe to their own dedicated “Always Free” hosting plans. With these, he/she can create up to 500 websites with the bandwidth and storage capacity to store and serve thousands of pages and media files.
Usage reporting in the CMS enables users to monitor how many resources their websites are consuming. Where necessary free plans could be upgraded to paid that would provide almost unlimited capacity.
The CMS database at the heart of the application contains all website content and visit/metric data. In cases where its capacity would become stretched this too can be created in a private instance from the daily backup that is held off-site in a Github repository.
In this way, the application is infinitely scalable, whilst remaining zero-cost.
Many websites are created out of a sense of professional obligation. The small business owner, for example, that wants to establish a presence on the web for prospective clients to read about his/her services and make contact.
The CMS therefore provides real time feedback to website authors about visit performance in the field. Each page visited on the cookie-free websites published by the CMS is monitored in the background; Google performance metrics, as well as time spent on each visible page, are automatically sent back to the CMS for owners to review.
It is important that website owners know when their site is visited, where the visitors are located, how they were referred to the site, how long they stayed, and how well the site performed. Websites published on purchased domains have these details sent automatically by email.
Google has issued guidelines in this area - for example, content should show in less than 2.5 seconds otherwise the site gets a poor rating that may effect its ranking on Google.
You wouldn't want to renew your domain name if no-one's coming to your site, and you certainly don't want to be bothered with the hassle of escaping from some hosting contract if your site isn't successful.
I'm obviously no UI/UX expert. However, if you're good at CSS the integrated Codepen download feature allows you make them as beautiful as your talents permit - you can replace the CSS rules used to deploy your sites using the Codepen upload feature.
Websites are deployed framework-free in the interests of maximising performance.