But to me it's much more than a website. Behind it is a set of software tools I've been developing for website generation. The public-facing website is in effect a major demo of what the tools can do. The programming challenge is what makes it worthwhile, stretching the site's capabilities is highly rewarding. Also improving the site's performance and efficiency is a benefit of "roll-your-own" site creation. Polishing it to excellent results contributes to a sense of accomplishment.
Anyway it's pretty easy and cheap to use a modest VPS to host the site. If a person has the knowledge running a self-managed host is quite practical and allows maximum freedom and minimal risk of "deplatforming" that was going on a while back even if the risk is near zero.
I never expected to get a lot of traffic, though there is some. One surprising aspect has been the number of attempted "break-ins" (e.g., via ssh). Properly configuring a firewall is a necessity. But that stuff is just part of normal administrative responsibility.