I guess it depends on your point of view. I also self-host, but I do it because I want control of my data. I'm not the blogging type, but even if I were, I would not consider it a failure that my self-hosted blog went down under the weight of hacker news.

It's not like many other professionally hosted websites haven't done the same over the years, and my data remains in my control even when my website is crushed under the weight of enthusiastic visitors, so my self-hosting goal would be intact.