1. Have a computer in your house open exposed to the internet on port 80- port forward on your router.
2. Run an http server on that box. Apache is a reasonable choice but there are probably easier pieces of software out there to set up.
2a. Create an index.html or equivalent default page name and put some html in it even if it's just hello world- it can even be in plain text.
3. Technically you are now self hosted on the internet! Figure out your external IP from your router and point a browser to http://$YOURIP/ and you should see your page.
The next steps are optional but kind of required to have a "real" site.
4. Set up dns. Since you won't have a static IP from your ISP almost certainly, you will need to use a dynamic dns provider. Noip.com is a popular choice. Once this is working you can register a domain name with GoDaddy or whoever and then point that name to your dynamic dns provider. Now you can load up http://www.yourdomain.com (or whatever tld you choose)
5. Set up https. For some reason beyond my comprehension google is forcing everyone to use https if they want to really exist on the internet in any real way even if they are just serving static pages. Let's encrypt can you there for free. Now you can go to https://www.yourdomain.com and your page will show up and Google et al might even consider you to be a real presence on the internet and index you one day.
Setting up Apache properly is a much bigger PITA for anything other than a static html use IMHO.
In the 90s I taught myself html to build out stuff, but never had to host anything.
Apache? I've heard it a thousand times. Couldn't tell you what it was.
So, yeah. Assume I'm yr mom.
This is also a good example of why web2 came to be. Cuz people like me have zero idea what's being talked about.
I don't think anyone was lamenting that its not super duper easy to create a freestanding website these days, just that its becoming increasingly difficult to without requiring centralized services- most notably ssl.
web2 also generally refers to web2.0 where we moved from static webpages and webpages that could only really change in significant ways if you hit refresh, to dynamically updated webpages, initially using AJAX, but there are now a myriad of ways to do so- but this allowed clunky web pages to have capabilities that are more or less at parity with desktop applications. Then again with all this web3 talk, what "web2" refers to may get distorted over time.
But yeah- running your own web infrastructure is work and hence why wordpress and other blog service providers, as well as even things like Geocities were/are so popular. While it is a lot more common these days, but even having a computer that was on 24/7/365 was not common and this was reason enough to use a hosted solution. Most of my friends have some sort of media server setup that is on 24/7 these days, but we are admittedly likely still outliers on this, compared to entirely non-technical people.