Currently I am self hosting (which is fairly cheap, ~$100/year if you include a domain name) but sometime I wonder if I make things hard on myself for no reason ;p
I mean self-hosted GitLab is fine, I don't know that you're losing out on any major features. But I wouldn't worry about using GitHub unless security and control of your assets is a critical necessity, in which case you definitely shouldn't trust some VPS/cloud provider either.