Because VPS is cheaper than any managed service offering out there when you start to add up the features. For example Azure App Services can host: .NET, PHP, Python, and Node WITHOUT a container, but the second you want a custom DNS name its incredibly expensive.

A $5 VPS + CapRover instantly gives you your own app host + CICD server which you fully own, none of your data is owned by AWS or Azure either.

Most people dont self host because they dont want to worry about updating the OS and Database servers and clustering and HA/DR. Which is far. But for the average dude like me spinning up fun side projects and random stuff, why wouldn't I self-host it for next to nothing?

I tend to separate my frontend (Cloudflare Pages) from my backend (VPS/CapRover).

I'm trying to decide whether to do this same thing or try and keep all of the "backend" parts in Cloudflare Workers (Pages Functions) and other "serverless" options (such as Turso for the DB).