The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged to death, the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton of money. For a blog that doesn't earn you anything, the choice is clear.
Besides, you can just put it behind cloudflare for free.
Absolutely. And I never said that everybody should use the cloud. Contrary to OP, it's more complicated than that. Not every site has the same needs. Some sites need scaling. Some sites are fine with being hugged to death, others would lose millions of dollars if they were. Some people are happy to tinker with their nginx config and package upgrades etc, others prefer to deploy and forget it (with cost controls enabled).
Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare, but 25 years ago served my own site from an iBook under the stairs.
> The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged to death
Learn 2 load balance
If only it were that simple. Don't forget:
Learn 2 HA
Learn 2 MFA
Learn 2 backup
Learn 2 recover within RTO
Learn 2 ETL
Learn 2 queue
Learn 2 scale horizontally
Learn 2 audit log
Learn 2 SEIM
Learn 2 continuously gather SOC evidence
...
> the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton of money
I'm perfectly happy to use cloud stuff for work. I will never ever give any cloud platform my personal credit card. I don't want to be the position of a misconfiguration leaving my finances at the mercy of the AWS forgiveness gods.