...because I know how expensive running a website is becoming.
What sort of money are you talking about? And where does it go?
I won't speak for Bill, but expenses add up quickly.
I used to run hundreds of websites. Each one could easily gobble up five figures in monthly expenses after paying for content (on-site and on other sites), PPC, links (to help organic search ranks), and hosting if you're driving a ton of traffic.
And once a site becomes huge, you should hire a team to handle these chores. That adds to the monthly expense.
A great deal depends upon what one wants to do. In answer to Timothy's question, a simple author site using shared hosting (or even a free blogger or WordPress.com account) if all one wants to do is have a place to show off books (and links to vendors) and maybe a little bio isn't going to be that expensive. It could even be free, but probably not if you also want newsletter signups, which seem to be a paid feature in a lot of places.
If you're running a site (author or otherwise) to which you want to drive significant traffic, that's a whole other ballgame. Free isn't going to cut it. Shared hosting isn't going to cut it. You're stuck with VPS or a dedicated server. That's partly because of SEO considerations, driven by the way Google ranks sites in search results. The ones on page 1 (aside from the ads) are likely to be the ones that run the fastest. An author who just wants people to have website to see if they search for that author may not care. An author trying to pull people away from social media platforms and/or sell from the site is going need some SEO mojo. Oh, and you'll need a cdn like Cloudflare, so that your site will run fast in any major area Google tests it, not just near the main server where it's hosted.
But performance is not the only issue. Security is a growing concern, which means at least something like Wordfence, maybe also an external firewall like Sitelock or Cloudlfare's. (After being hacked, I have both.)
Then there's GDPR compliance. It may be easier in other environments, but in WordPress, it's almost impossible to prevent all cookies from loading prior to user consent. I tested at least a dozen plugins before finding the one I use--which is a paid plugin, as most of the GDPR ones are. Otherwise, you have cookies loading, some of which may gather information, before consent, and you're vulnerable.
Oh, and if you want to have a blog that actually attracts readers, a visually attractive layout helps, and, since all your posts shouldn't be ads for your books, that probably means licensing at least a few graphics.
The bigger the company running the website, and the higher the need for internet recruitment of customers and even sales, the more expensive the operation is going to be.
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