For most personal projects, hosting on the cloud may be overkill, but tempting with its supposed ease of use and benefits of scale. Self-hosting is often overlooked as a solution with the benefit of simplicity and cost.
Interesting discussion and demonstration of self hosting the kinds of apps most personal projects will end being.
Personally I self-host on a raspberry pi. It took me a few weeks to setup, but it has been running without problems for almost 2 years now at practically no cost (beyond purchase and electricity).