I've just moved away from hosting on AWS to buying a refurbished Dell Optiplex 5060 and installing docker compose on it. Traffic comes in using a cloudflare tunnel. The only costs are electricity (it's very low power and virtually silent) and the domain (if you need one), and I'm thrilled with it.

I'm working on a replacement for discord for audio and video chats, hosting is $2 per month so far. Mostly I just need a reliable way to do NAT hole punching.

I have tried self-hosting a few things over the years. It is great for control and privacy, but the maintenance overhead adds up quickly. For me it works best for small tools or personal utilities, while bigger systems are usually easier to leave as SaaS.

The only thing I've decided to not bother trying to self-host is email. IP reputation and managing deliverability is hard.

Recently, I slefhosted "actual budget" in my server.

It is really good software for managing personal finance.

also i built custom wake on lan page for turning on to home PC for remote work

I always worried about security problem, So i tried apply mTLS to Caddy proxy. it works for me.

p12 certificates working greate.

My wife also using this Wake on Lan tool every day. She learned how to use RDP over ssh tunneling from me

I ended up somewhere in the middle. A few things run on a small machine at home, but anything that needs to stay reachable lives on a cheap VPS. Mostly just a couple of docker containers and some basic monitoring.

I tried self hosting for a couple of months and ended up deciding to buy GPU power. Cloud services (renting GPU power) seemed easier when it comes to scaling my SaaS.

Does using Hetzner instances count?

I'm finding it is so much easier to just deploy to my servers there, with some cloudflare offerings in the mix.

I’m not self-hosting much. My server is more of a file server with compute at the top. I have Jellyfin for Infuse on my AppleTV, gonic for my music library (with minidlna to play on my AVR), and Calibre for ebook. Everything else is backups or some random experiment (the main point is that it’s an always on linux computer with wired connection). I have a VPS for stuff I want online.