> You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting company, and even that would be self-hosting.

That's what I do. I use Linode/Akamai, which now has encrypted VPS instances.

Ideally, I'd have my own hardware but I don't want to deal with the maintenance and failure cases (house fire, etc). I think a VPS is a solid tradeoff.

Agreed. I have shifted a lot of my services to VPSes just because it's easier to deal with. However, it comes with less freedom and control