I run a portfolio and blog similar to your idea with Hugo on an old gaming PC with Proxmox and 25 other services, my family or I use daily.

For the use case, you talk about, a Rpi would be perfect, but if you have an old laptop you can repurpose that instead.

I argue that self hosting for the most part shouldn’t cost a dollar unless you want to. A dynamic DNS like duck DNS and a residential ISP are more than enough.

A simple Nginx reverse proxy on pi or Debian laptop to host Hugo built HTML and CSS would work flawlessly.

To prevent attacks, basic fail2ban on Nginx is a good start. Crowdsec being the next step and keep advancing.

Once you get started, the possibilities are endless and then you may need the exaggerated services, but not for text.

Good Luck OP !

That’s the point. It taught me things that I wouldn’t learn if it weren’t for that scared feeling. I agree that some sensitive things are better off my server.

You should start small and keep only things you want to be public, and services under basic logins. First logins, maybe admin admin but slowly you will get better and also place fail2ban and crowdsec. Once you have enough confidence and years of service on your belt. You can trust it with sensitive files under heavy guard.