Self-hosting doesn’t actually save you money, and the people who promise it does are setting beginners up to quit

Yep it’s quite true. If you are just going to host one or two things, you could get away with a Raspberry Pi, but I have about 40+ containers running, and I realise I’m on my 3rd or 4th iteration of hardware. I don’t have anything fancy as my small form-factor server cannot even mount a GPU card. It was a squeeze to just add a riser card with an interface for SATA drives. Then I have two external 6 TB each NAS drives, another external USB drive for 4 TB backup as well, a UPS power supply, a managed switch, a network cabinet, and it uses extra electricity 24/7. With all this I constantly update and maintain the setup. And then too, this all needs replacing at some point again. Yes it gives better privacy, and you learn a lot by testing different options out, etc. But if you want plain ease of use, some GPU horsepower maybe, and reliable backup, then often it is cheaper to just go with a paid open-source hosted service. This is how many open-source projects survive today, by selling…