1. Control and privacy. The server does exactly what I choose, not somebody’s business model.
2. Once you have other users, it’s not a hobby anymore. People are not amused by downtime.
3. The w3schools.com tutorials have been good for me.

Piracy is increasingly becoming the only reasonable answer.

Two things, one you care about and one you might not. The one you care about: you can set up a service in isolation. You can then test it, make sure it works, and switch over to it once you are sure, with almost no downtime. This is important for things you actually need to use. Once you do something like breaking your primary email server, you will understand. Also, less important, you can set up a service on, say, a VM at home, and move it to a VPS, without having to transfer the entire image, and it will work the same. The one you don’t care about. That last bit about moving servers around is important for cloud providers who turn these things on and off all the time.

name.com. I don’t remember why I picked them, but they do no BS and the service is fine.

Likewise. I have been running it for years, almost no problem that I can think of. My setup is pretty vanilla, Apache, MySQL. It’s running in a container behind a reverse proxy. I keep it as up to date as possible. Only 3 people use mine, and I don’t use very many apps: files, notes, bookmarks, calendar, email.