Comment by angiolillo

> Content creating is not maintenance.

Technical maintenance isn't the only kind of website maintenance. Unless you're ready to put a site into hibernation, maintaining the content is an ongoing cost. For example, Ian adds testimonial photos and quotes that people submit via email not to mention corrections and improvements based on feedback.

> It could've been a two-million-dollar website if he'd tried to roll his own CMS and Javascript framework

Sure, and it could have been a three-million-dollar website if he wrote a web server from scratch in a language he invented to host the bespoke CMS and JavaScript framework he created.

But more reasonable alternatives to a personal HTML/CSS site like this would be either an off-the-shelf CMS or a third-party website builder. Those seem like they'd be more expensive in some ways and cheaper in others.