We've been running Gitlab for over half a decade with over 100 repos, runners on Windows, Linux and Mac with minimal need for maintenance.

Same story for the primary free software project we rely on (who we have a support contract with). Neither us nor them spend anywhere close to 10 hours a year on maintaining selfhosted Gitlab related infrastructure.

> People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server

People underestimate consistently how complicated is to build reliable things, hardware or software. There is a world between "it works for me" and "it works for all"

And dysfunctional organizations. I worked as a contractor at one place where we simply used the shared file server as a git remote.

Reasoning was if the file server was down, it would come back up quickly because it affects everyone. I didn't understand this reasoning until I got emails from the database team saying the database servers stopped working and every development team now needs to change their connection string from machinename-abc.corp to machinename-bcd.corp

How in the world someone could write an email like that is beyond me. Ok machines crash all the time but why can't they reuse the same name for the new machine?

Full DNS propagation used to easily take up to two days back in the day. It might be that.

Outside the ~4 hours I spent setting up GitLab (for the first time) 3+ years ago, I've spent an average of perhaps 10 minutes per month maintaining it (and the runner on a separate server).

(And that's literally only because I choose to update it manually since it's usually offline for about 15-30 minutes during updates...)

> You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things

Depends on where you are are doing it. AWS makes it ridiculously easy to hand off basically all aspects of hosting. Set up once, use forever.

AWS does not go to this category. You are literally paying for them to handle these matters.