Yeah, exorbitant. Didn't like paying $300 a year just to run some simple websites/databases
If you can get away with hosting on your own computer on a residential connection, that's great for you, but it's a totally different product from what AWS/GCP/colocation offer.
By the way, reserved instance pricing on AWS and GCP starts around $20/year. But if you know how to use S3/GS and Dynamo/Datastore, you don't even have to use an instance.
At the moment I just use EC2 and GCP instances (and a couple of GCS buckets)
On Google, the comparable offering is an f1-micro instance, which goes for $3.88/month (https://cloud.google.com/compute/vm-instance-pricing#pricing).