The flexibility and learning is more important for me. For example I want to aggregate HN comments and lobste.rs comments and inject that into the HTML before serving. (on the server side so no CORS or other additions)

I was considering adding additional metrics to see who is hitting the server and how at the reverse proxy level.

This is all stuff I can't really do on a github pages blog.

I see what you're saying if you want set and forget that's fine, but like I said above it's a tradeoff.

The one server I have just has 80 and 443 open with nginx. I expect it to run indefinitely with little maintenance.