Everyone likes “free”. The allure of getting something for nothing is always strong, especially when it comes to building a website.
There are any number of services available these days to build your own website at zero cost. You might have to buy a domain name, but even those you can get free for the first year. So where's the catch?
Advertisements. If your website is constantly invaded by ads, many of your visitors will likely be distracted to the point of going elsewhere. To get rid of the ads your only choice is to upgrade to a paid plan. It might be as little as $10/month, but those costs soon mount up.
Is there a better way? You could assemble the individual components of your website using the “always free” services offered by independent technology companies. But which services do you need, and which companies offer the best free plans? Moreover, if you just want to start a blog or create a presence for your business, do you have the skills and experience to do it yourself?
Even if you can create your own website, how to get it ranked by Google? How do you make it accessible, so people with disabilities are not excluded? How do you ensure that mobile phone visitors get a good experience and don't use up their data plans accessing your site?
And what about performance? How do you know if your visitors aren't waiting too long for your website to download? And which pages are they reading and for how long? How did they get referred to your site and where are they located? Do you even know if you have any visitors?
The CMS application is a sort of hybrid system, combining what I think are the best free services available today into an easily extendible solution. The important thing is that the websites cost nothing to build or run beyond the price of a domain name, and will never show adverts.