I host a number of web sites on the Wolfram Cloud as it is the original platform I thought about deploying my sites to.

Recently, though (the past 6 months?) I've been questioning my choices. The cloud has some notable issues:

• It's slow: content takes a long time to load—sometimes so long the browser times out and refuses to load my stylesheets
• Uploads and downloads are slow: GitHub, where I host a public paclet server, can upload large numbers of changes very fast (and download them too). With the cloud I have to make a slow CopyFile call for each bit of content as opposed to some batch multipart upload.
• The service is unreliable: when deploying lots content to the cloud often one or two files don't upload and then I have to make a slew of even slower calls to CloudObjects to debug which ones didn't upload (assuming I'm not updating—in which case the CloudObject::serverr message gives me exactly 0 information to debug which files didn't upload)
• The URLs are ugly
• Almost everything defaults to HTTP when most prominent services (and perhaps the most prominent for developers) use HTTPS. Browsers often refuse to serve HTTP content when the main content uses HTTPS. See for instance what happens when you go to https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/b3m2a1/home/index.html we are routed to http://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/b3m2a1/home where some of my icons and webfonts do not show up. An index page requested via HTTPS should not route to a cleaner URL using HTTP. If anything it should go the other way.

So as someone who wants to host a website that does not use cloud notebooks, outside of sometimes embedding the free sandbox ones, why should I use the cloud?

I ask this not to be a troll, but rather as someone who would prefer not to change deployment strategies, but also doesn't want to persist in something suboptimal and inefficient when simple, apparently better solutions (i.e. GitHub Pages) exist for the kinds of things I care about.