The site is currently being hosted on Netlify, a newish service for hosting websites. It can be a bit hard to parse through all the marketing speak, but Netlify basically exists to make it easier to host static (and static-ish) websites by supporting multiple build tools and technologies, and abstracting away pain points surrounding topics like hosting, HTTPs, servers, etc. Basically, if you have your site’s code hosted on Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket, and you are using any sort of popular Static Site Generator (or a common node.js-based build system involving Grunt or Gulp), you can get your site to be built and deployed on Netlify as soon as you push your latest commits. And even on their free tier, your code is hosted on a CDN with extremely fast response times.
For me, the biggest benefit to using Netlify is the reduced maintenance requirements. The only thing I need to tell Netlify is which version of Hugo I am using; when I push site updates to my Gitlab repo, the service loads up that same version of Hugo, builds the site using the default command, and serves up the content from the default public folder. Easy peasy.
The nice thing about this is that since Hugo is a static executable, there are little to no security risks involved with supporting older versions. I imagine I will be able to keep my current Hugo version locked in for quite some time without any issue. I also like that this makes it extremely easy to know how the site is going to look and work on Netlify, since it is running the same commands that I am.
Netlify also provides a nice web UI for configuring how your site is deployed. I haven’t had much use for all of the options, but they make sense and I find them potentially helpful.
All in all, the experience of using the service has been extremely pleasant, and I hope it continues to get better rather than worse. With modern, VC-funded services, you can never be too sure as to when the party stops and things start to get crappy, expensive or both.