Not all the above apply to a hobby-blog style site, but I wasn't referring only to OP's site in my original comment. I understand that not everyone needs to feed into "fucking Internet gatekeeper"s as you described, but the fact that they provide valuable services is undeniable. They make a complex operation -- one that could mean the difference between a company being able to sell their product or not -- simple.
For OP, I'd also be interested to see the benchmarks between this £4 server, and a £8 or £10 one, same stack.
Google Cloud CDN: Give us time, and we'll do to HTTP what we did to SMTP
they already did it - it's called chrome.