I don't need a VPS anymore

In your linked article you say:

"Anyway, site search is only a nice-to-have...and folks can just use Google with the site: operator instead"

To me that sounds like a compromise.

I'm out of my depth talking about SSG-powered sites because I've never developed them. My area is frontend design-dev, without the engineering stripes or desire for overly complicated builds. That's why PHP and the traditional dynamic sites work for me.

PHP, javascript, templates and a good reliable CMS allows me - the non-engineer, to do really interesting things such as site search with lots of added unique tricks to make users happy when they search for things.

Beyond my needs, the non-technical people I build sites for need to manage the content easily. That's where I scratch my head with the SSG offerings in that regard. Where the CMS is often the lowest priority, with bizarre suggestions and workarounds to fill the CMS void. For complex content-heavy sites with lots of products, forms, landing pages and categories, a good CMS is really important... and a general architecture that isn't scattered around big tech services IMHO.

I don't share the view, if we consider small web sites or apps. For me, using containerized apps, having external backups of the DB, means I can reboot the app fast in a clean state if an attacker manages to break in and do nasty things. The OS and apps can be updated with ease, to stay up to day with security patches.

Apart from some limited cases, I think it's cheaper to have your own servers if you don't have to pay much for their administration.

And I hate not owning my data, my apps, having to depend on a third party.

Personally I know few colleagues enthusiasts to have Proxmox set up at home and all of them fails to say why they need it. Similarly few "geeks" enthusiasts of their new toy no matter what, it's a "Widows classic" race toward colorful WebUI without asking if it's needed, useful or not.

Just as a small example: even a personal, small, static, clean, classic website, why not just making with a homepage saying "this website is just the advertisement of my feeds, there are same random post as showcase, if you like them just add this or this other feed to you favorite feed reader, full articles are in the feed, no ads or so". If the website is just a kind of blog that does not sell products, live on ads etc why maintain it at all will all classic web things?

Similarly why webmails? We completely miss modern MUA, yes, because all development is centered around web(cr)apps, but some for geeks/techies do exists (for instance notmuch, mu) and a frontend for generic user is not that strange (some exists, like astroid, but are not much nice probably because too few develop and use them) "hey but that means downloading their own emails!", yes. Emails are actually personal data no different than photos or pdf why consider them something else?

Long story short: why invest FLOSS development time and resources to copycat big tech tools built to lock-in and control users, not for users advantage when we can know from the history, just looking for it, how desktop computing was born, networked and so powerful?

A personal romance description: when I power on my desktop I hit a button and do something else while it boot (for instance taking a shower, eat something, get dressed, ...) it boot up with an "agenda view", witch means a sort of timeline and tasklist combined. A single key on my keyboard open a search & narrow UI for my personal data, anything, I can type first chars of a person name, get a pertinent result instantly, see the relative "card" with links to email exchanged with that person, specific threads I highlight, things we do together, things we have up/todo etc in a single "active" page. But also cards for my phone bills well ordered in timeline, with matching bank transactions, notes, notification mails, ... But also cards for ideas/projects, personal notes, investments, tools, ... My dishwasher break? Ok, a single key, few chars, enter/tab and I'm in it's card with info about where, when I bought it, relevant model, vendor, ... so in an instant I have all info I need to call someone for an warranty intervention or that's out of warranty etc. It's a magic web-app self-hosted on k8s home cluster run on two servers etc? No. It Emacs/org-mode/org-roam/EXWM/* and few bits of elisp and script to automate workflows enough. Easy to sync on all my machine via my simple homeserver with unison, no webui needed, from remote it's just fwknop+ssh just to be paranoid and get far more safety than a complex web auth with OTP, perhaps on crappy and full of vulnerabilities "smartphone" etc. Yes, collaboration is not so immediate, but just because Emacs community is not big enough, so certain aspects are not really developed and if you look around real collaboration is actually not really developed anywhere, for most that means a shared repo if you are a dev/ops guy or a shared "directory" to push&pull files from with some kind of extras almost ignored by 99% of users + some softphones. We have screen sharing, also good enough with certain apps, we have even near-real-time multi-users simultaneous edit of generic documents, almost no one use that feature. We just still have to learn how to push data/files around to really collaborate.

Since from the Xerox Star Office System (not to be confused with proprietary LibreOffice predecessor) years have passed it's about time to resolve such issues instead of keeping play with bloatware and anti-users tools...

To me it seems like a “cover your ass” clause they put in there to be able to disconnect people who put undue stress on a shitty oversubscribed asymmetric network by hosting a very popular and heavy website, or if they notice a large business website being hosted and need an excuse to force the company to upgrade to a business-grade plan. It does not necessarily mean they’ll enforce it religiously without a good technical & financial justification.

As long as your overall usage remains within the bounds of a typical home user, you’ll be fine. Keep in mind that nowadays home users use a ton of upload bandwidth for things like cloud storage/backups and don’t get cut off even if they saturate the pipe for hours, so you have a pretty wide margin to play with. Torrenting and P2P also use upload heavily and have been around for decades without many horror stories that I know of (the main problem with torrents is copyright infringement and not bandwidth usage).

A self-hosted personal website or some apps (Nextcloud, etc) for personal usage will be a drop in the bucket compared to the above.