You can't tell me that $5 a month for a VPS is more expensive than the administrative overhead of self-hosting in your own house. The average person on this website probably earns that in less than 10 minutes. On the other hand, it'll cost you $25 to get a Raspberry Pi and at least a few hours to get your Linux distribution of choice flashed and running so that it's project-ready. That's before you even get httpd installed, start stuffing around with port forwarding and firewall rules, configure dynamic DNS, etc. Of course, most VPS providers will also give you PaaS, so you don't need to do any sort of system or application configuration whatsoever - you can just actually run your website.

I personally self-host because it's neat and interesting to me, but not because it's simple and cheap - if you want to actually get a website or some other service running on the WWW going, VPSs are a god-send. Also, consider the fact that unless I do actually use a Raspberry Pi, which is very flexible but underpowered, I'm going to be paying for potentially quite expensive new hardware and electricity if I self-host, as well as bandwidth. These are all non-issues with a VPS.

Also, SSL certs are necessarily centralised, because they operate on a web of trust in a world where we don't know who to trust or not. If you have a website using a certificate which is self-signed, I'm not going to trust it unless I know you personally, because if I don't know you personally I have no way of determining that you are who you say you are - only a trusted CA is going to do that. That's why a green-padlock in your browser means 'One of a limited number of root CAs trusted by the distributors of this browser says this site is owned by who it says its owned by', not just 'this site is owned by who it says its owned by'.

Just use your normal desktop computer.

Like many people, I only have a laptop.