Believe me, we would too and we are sorry about the current state of GitLab.com. We are working on improving performance in Q1 2016: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues
That's not to say there isn't educational value, but a common piece of advice I've gotten is "Don't optimize for anything but your life." Or more easily explained: Don't optimize for things you don't need to.
I'm from the old school, I use SaaS/PaaS mostly for stuff I know is painful to do yourself (sometimes file storage, nearly always email) but the rest lives on vanilla boxes configured with ansible (frankly ansible is faster to use once you get your head around it than learning 5 different PaaS setups).
That said, you do have a point, and you decide what matters to you as a hobbyist (or whatever you decide to call yourself).
I personally like (and need, most of the time) stuff that "just works", so I totally get your point about optimizing and agree with it.
I'm personally glad to have done things the hard way, sure it took some time to learn but learning sysadmin made me a better developer.
To me, setting up a repository, an issue tracker, a wiki etc. was more about learning about a process than learning "how to make it work on the server".
Process as "how to organise the production of writing software" and this is imho extremely important, I reuse what I learned all the time from web app to mobile app to server backend etc.
Simply put, I see a lot of people who fail to deal with software production simply because they just use the tool "a la mode" like Github, but are completely oblivious to the benefits of using semantic versioning, an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation, etc.
When you learn all that by yourself, you can compare different tools and have a feel for what's a "bare minimum", you just know how to manage/organise a project a make it work in production.
Maintaining the 10x SaaS services you use in a similar vein suddenly starts eating up close to whole days.
I completely disagree, here a little story
before 2005 I was hosting my own SVN repos, then came a community "we host your open source project for free" and I moved my sources there
and it closed, so I moved all my repos (they kept growing) to google code
my main reason to move to google code was "its' google they will never close down"
guess what? few years later, google code close down
at that point I decided NERVER EVER AGAIN, I moved all my repos to my own private dedicated server
now I do use Github but as a mirror, they can close down tomorrow I don't care (note: I don't wish them that)
Some people take their repositories very seriously, hobbyist or not, for me it's like backup you only see how important the infrastructure is when the shit hits the fan.
Things like Github, Gitlab, etc. are nice but it's merely a beautiful web UI on top of what is important: the repository.
My point is even if you are an hobbyist you should own and control your repository, if you can host it on a dedicated server, or at home on a spare box, whatever, do it, do own it (the infra), yes because a tarball archive of your repo and a JSON export of your issues is completely useless.
Doesn't every distributed system let you keep your own repo under your control? I have all my projects on github but if github disappeared tomorrow I'd just push my repos to a different service.
[1] http://gitlab.com