I did it this way for a long time, but it was mostly a learning/experimenting/fun thing back to have a "proper" server out there that I can run whatever service I wanted on (be it an irc bouncer or whatever). I'm a grownup now and don't have the time/care anymore and just run them out of s3/cloudflare (which was still "fun", but now I don't need to worry about the cve of the day. I don't mind contributing to the centralization of the internet when I'm paying $0/month for pages that nobody visits. Definitely happy to nerd out again if something ever warrants it).

I don’t do it myself, but “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” is a bold claim. It might be harder, but we (geeks) love to do things ourselves.

If someone is willing to use something like Hugo instead of garbage sites like Medium why not use a VPS? For many people working in tech $10/month and free are the same thing.

I pay $35/month for a dedicated server for my nothing webpages. One the one hand, I could really host at home for $0/month extra. Or on a VPS for $5/month. I do need my own thing because I run a network testing tool that needs some amount of direct access.

On the other hand, dedicated servers are more fun, even if the cpus I get for $35/month are ancient. Is it $30/month fun? Probably not, but it's near zero given my situation.

At least I'm sensible and don't have an actual colo space to visit.

In the unlikely event I go viral, I'm pretty sure my server can manage serving https at 1gbps, and that's plenty. Maybe TLS is too much though, the cpus are too old for AESNI.

some people (myself included) like hosting their own stack for fun or for learning.

There's additional concern with tying your work to something like github it makes it more of a pain to pull it off and put it somewhere else.

I'm not really sure what you mean by objectively inferior. It's trade offs like everything in this field.

As far as harder, I don't really think the lift for a personal VPS is that high. Again it's a fun hobby project for most. It's fun to run your own stack.

If you want to opt into the github cloudflare goodness that's fine they're good services but I wouldn't say it's better or degnegrate others for not doing that.

s3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.

Another option is cloudflare pages. Can be coupled with any hub or you can just push html artifacts.