I find the idea of using AWS for personal use absolutely terrifying. You are signing up for literally unlimited costs. If my site gets ddosed, I don’t want a $100,000 bill, I want the site to go offline.

Honestly this is a valid concern. I am not knocking AWS and they are working with us but $100000 in one week from bad code in a Java service is really nerve racking. For the record the only reason I use AWS over other clouds is because they actually work with you when stuff like this happens. ( Its taking a long time but we are hopeful)

then use Lightsail or set a maximum size for your ec2 autoscaling group

Or stop overengineering and use a PaaS like Netlify.

But outbound traffic

Cloudflare Pages is free.

It's very odd that AWS doesn't support spending caps. A lot of other services and paid APIs I use have them, and they save me a ton of stress.

As long as enough people use AWS despite the lack of spending caps and the stress it causes, it just means Amazon effectively monetizing your risk tolerance.

I would prefer to pay like this, especially since I'm not writing a ton of blog posts. To me it's better to pay $10 for a viral post than pay $10/month continuously with little traffic. It depends on your use case though. Low traffic sites like mine are great for hosting on S3.