GitHub pages drawbacks and concerns seen from a noob in jekyll

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I have just begun to use Jekyll.

I have it working locally with math equation display using mathjax.
It works great, I am sure this is the way to go to have a simple and versatile system to create my personal page about geotechnics.

Being GitHub pages an easy way to go online I have given it a try.
But I have found some drawbacks and concerns, I am not sure if due to my inexperience or they are real limitations of GitHub pages.

Here is the list I have found, feel free to comment about them and if you know some advice to circunvent some of them, please let me know.

  1. Cannot use own certificate.
    I want to use my own fomain name. You can do it using a cname. But nowadays https is a must, and if you activate https, you cannot install your own certificates, at least I could not find how to do it. So you receive certificate errors from web nav when you access the site.
  2. It is not compatible with all Jekyll themes.
    There are some official Jekyll themes in GitHub pages. But I don’t have the time and soul to test many of them to see if they fit my needs. I have found a theme with scrolling interface Prologue that I have liked. It seems simple and easy to modified. I have changed it to adapt it to my needs providing multiple collection support, mathjax integrations and other minor changes.
    But GitHub pages complains about the theme sending emails each time I change a file telling me that my theme is not compatible with GitHub pages. It seems to work OK, but it does not display latex equations, even it does locally.
  3. Privacy.
    Even most of my content would be public, I don’t want some of the source files to be displayed to the public. I would like to make a private section to keep some information (personal notes) only for me.
    If you use a free public repository everybody can see any part of your Jekyll site (httaccess files).
  4. Math equations.
    I need maths in my notes and documents. I have modified my theme to include a section in the header to insert mathjax.js code and render latex equations.
    It works locally but in the online GitHub pages version equations are not rendered.

I like GitHub because it is easy to upload your site using atom or their GitHub desktop program, keep it in sync and easy to use.

Due to this limitations I am thinking to abandone GitHub pages and use my own server.
Is there a way to circunvent them?

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You’re basically right - github pages is super limited. It’s good for publishing text conveniently.

Netlify is every bit as convenient, without the drawbacks. You could also use an S3 bucket, or self-host if you like. Personally I used to use S3, and moved to netlify.

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I have some experience with s3 aws, but it is quite complicated and has an awfully complicated billing system.

For personal use i have amazon loghtsails basic i stance. I think it will do for the needed use.

But i have to find the way to use it as a git repository and pull request to it.
And then automate pushes to get last changes…. Jekyll build would recreate static files authomatycally.

Other way would be to send just the static files synced from my oc.