Apparently I’m still locked on this topic - @wojtekmach introduced MiniRepo roughly three months ago which looks like a good way to get a quick, private hex server up and running if cloning and deploying all of hex.pm proves to be overkill.
That said, I’ve found @ericmj and the hex.pm team to be extremely helpful and supportive. Seems like any of the above options will work well. Really just depends on personal preferences.