I run a portfolio and blog similar to your idea with Hugo on an old gaming PC with Proxmox and 25 other services, my family or I use daily.

For the use case, you talk about, a Rpi would be perfect, but if you have an old laptop you can repurpose that instead.

I argue that self hosting for the most part shouldn't cost a dollar unless you want to. A dynamic DNS like duck DNS and a residential ISP are more than enough.

A simple Nginx reverse proxy on pi or Debian laptop to host Hugo built HTML and CSS would work flawlessly.

To prevent attacks, basic fail2ban on Nginx is a good start. Crowdsec being the next step and keep advancing.

Once you get started, the possibilities are endless and then you may need the exaggerated services, but not for text.

Good Luck OP !

One thing you may want to consider, amazon and others do free tier instances. You can get a free EC2 instance, throw hugo on that and set it up for serving your text sites. Benefit being, if you mess something up and it gets hacked or compromised, it's not infecting your home network. They're about as powerful as an old pi.

If you're just serving static html, you can also serve that up straight from a bucket. Which makes backup/failover very easy to setup. And even if you don't want to give amazon your money, there are plenty of hosting providers that offer similar capabilities and free tiers. The thought being that once you grow beyond the free tier you'll pay for their services since it's annoying to move elsewhere.