Good question. I chose it initially because it was open source and way easier (in my eyes) than Apache. I don’t recall the others being an option at the time, or I was not aware of them. nginx does what I need without complaint, so I haven’t switched.
Unfortunately Cloudflare does not do .ca domains. I imagine this is because there are restrictions on who can own one, so it’s probably not worth the trouble for them.
I checked out the main feed, OP. Not sure this is going anywhere based on the content I saw. I have no opinion on the site as a technical work.
Another +1 for gitea. It works quite well and is easy to setup.
It’s fairly easy to add local domain names with pihole, so presuming all devices on your network are using it, you shouldn’t have a problem.
Gitlab uses a ton of resources and is a pain to setup. Once you get it going, it’s fine.
Going to echo what others have said: Use Gitea or Forgejo instead if you can. Both have runners you can setup like gitlab, but they instead mimic github actions instead of gitlab ci/cd.
I run a semi-private gitea instance, and have not had any problems past the initial setup in 2+ years.