If you don't need all of this, rent a VM somewhere, put a webserver on it (or use the static file support of your framework) and serve files from a directory on

If you don't need all of this, rent a VM somewhere, put a webserver on it (or use the static file support of your framework) and serve files from a directory on local storage. That's still possible and easy to do. You do need to consider backups, you don't get high availability or anything like that and you're limited to the amount of storage you can attach to the VM. So it's not the same as S3 at all, but depending on your needs it is an entirely valid solution. Serving files is a large space and people do very different things there. No single solution will fit all use cases and still remain simple.