@_elena @z428 Self-hosting is certainly not accessible for the masses right now.
I envision the equivalent of an iPhone-like server that sits in your house and has an easy interface like the app-store to install self-hosted applications, hiding the complexity of databases, storage, networking / load balancing, etc.
As for your VPS self-hosting costs - yes more expensive if you're just self-hosting Ghost, but if you also self-hosted plausible and other services on same VPS, the costs go down.