Thanks to the author for this, I definitely find those observations interesting.
In defense to the UK gov services website used as examples here. I think it is one of the most efficient website I’ve ever used. Absolutely superb on mobile/desktop, navigation and UX is clear and to the point. Accessibility is also top notch and I often refer to that website as the perfect example for clean product outcomes during product brainstorms.
One great thing about setting up your own server is to do it faster each time. Deployment, hardening, running services.
Get used to your terminal, use SSH, understand how firewalls work and run a couple of services such as nginx, fail2ban etc.
Once you have a hand of it try to do it using Ansible. It will be a valuable skill if you decide to provision, for example, a swarm of servers for a cluster. And it will give you reproducibility and a trail of steps that you will ensure get executed for each server you deploy.
In defense to the UK gov services website used as examples here. I think it is one of the most efficient website I’ve ever used. Absolutely superb on mobile/desktop, navigation and UX is clear and to the point. Accessibility is also top notch and I often refer to that website as the perfect example for clean product outcomes during product brainstorms.