The funny thing for me is how much more intuitive this is when you run an actual server, or vps, and how fundamental it is in that context ("Oh crap, bunch of views, they are slowing this laptop down a bunch!") while being so much more involved here.

I'm hesitant to generalize past myself, but I really wish someone made me learn the basics on a web server in my own home, where I could reboot it by pulling out a power cord, and transfer files with a usb stick. I would have been so much more able to make thought out trade-offs or attempt grander things.

Its straight-forward and free (at the margin) to throw up a password protected site on a server, but daunting in SaaS world. Same story for having a bash script update some page with a gnuplot chart with data obtained via curl/wget, vs. CORS and an API, and a charting library, and json ...

I shudder to think of how much time I wasted as I was just learning web anything on solutions that were way too big and complex for my goals at the time - from docker, to lambdas, AWS orbit based nuclear powered whatever to run a clock widget or whatnot. I'm certainly glad I learned those things, and they are scalable and safer and all those good things, but hard to put into context without knowing how one stupid server doing it all by itself would do it.

This is all a drawn out way of saying that the cheapest lightsail vps is like 3 bucks a month, and you can implement all the fanciest netlify features right on it, and if you never have done that, you really should. If anything when you do move to netlify, you will really appreciate it on a different level.