It's surprisingly easy and efficient to run a Gitea instance behind a reverse proxy (Nginx et. al) plugged into Let's Encrypt. The built in sqlite3 DB method is plenty capable and snappy for a dozen projects and small team of people, it runs comfortably on the typical $5 cloud server and it offers a lot of capabilities (to the users and the Admin). Hobbyist groups like Disroot and non-profits like Codeberg are using it with much success, many folks find it easy to run their own personal instance within a few hours. Plenty of people share their build recipes online to just "clone and go" to DIY.