Tooling for self-hosting is quite powerful nowadays. You can start with hosted components and swap various things in for a self-hosted bit. For instance, my blog is self-hosted on a home-server.
It has Cloudflare Tunnel in front of it, but I previously have used nginx+letsencrypt+public_ip. It stores data on Cloudflare R2 but I've stored on S3 or I could store on a local NAS (since I access R2 through FUSE it wouldn't matter that much).
You have to rent:
* your domain name - and it is right that this is not a permanent purchase
* your internet access
But almost all other things now have tools that you can optionally use. If you turn them off the experience gets worse but everything still works. It's a much easier time than ever before. Back in the '90s and early 2000s, there was nothing like this. It is a glorious time. The one big difference is that email anti-spam is much stricter but I've handled mail myself as recently as 8 years ago without any trouble (though I now use G Suite).
It has Cloudflare Tunnel in front of it, but I previously have used nginx+letsencrypt+public_ip. It stores data on Cloudflare R2 but I've stored on S3 or I could store on a local NAS (since I access R2 through FUSE it wouldn't matter that much).
You have to rent:
* your domain name - and it is right that this is not a permanent purchase
* your internet access
But almost all other things now have tools that you can optionally use. If you turn them off the experience gets worse but everything still works. It's a much easier time than ever before. Back in the '90s and early 2000s, there was nothing like this. It is a glorious time. The one big difference is that email anti-spam is much stricter but I've handled mail myself as recently as 8 years ago without any trouble (though I now use G Suite).