> And spending how many hours a month maintaining it and applying updates and security patches
Looks like GitLab puts out one release a month. Not a big deal. One day a month you can roll out the latest and greatest if you really want to. I probably wouldn't even do it that often, depending on what's included.
As far as all the underlying stuff, depending on what Linux distro you pick it should be pretty self maintaining nowadays for everything that's required to self host GitLab. nginx, PHP, etc. will all self update with your package manager of choice.
> setting up monitoring and dealing with downtime?
If you're buying a VPS you shouldn't need to worry about these. Any decent host will make sure your VM is up and have a high enough uptime to be solid for any use case short of enterprise. If you're an enterprise you might want to spend more than $5/mo.
> We're running our own private GitLab server but we thought long and hard before doing it.
To be fair, maintaining an (internal) gitlab server really only costs you the upgrade time. You make a snapshot, upgrade (and optionally rollback if something breaks). It takes exceptionally little time - unlike say, running your own email server.
