Hey, I was thinking about getting a VPS and hosting my own single user Lemmy instance. I am trying to think of other things to host. I already have some old hardware running unRAID with Plex, the *arrs, Kavita and home assistant. This is pushing my hardware to the limit but I still want to mess around with some self hosted things. Is there anything you would rather host on a rented server as opposed to a server sitting at your home?
For me that’d depend on traffic volume and availability needs, and who needs to access it. I have a dynamic IP, so things that are very public facing that needs some minimum availability like Lemmy I put on a real server, so I don’t miss on receiving content and go out of sync.
Stuff that’s just for me and can tolerate occasional downtime I serve right from home. My IRC bouncer for example can be served from home just fine with a VPN or proxy. My DNS server and emails are on a hosted server. Some of my websites can be served locally, some I serve from the hosted server.
Some stuff I have hybrid setups, like my hosted server can serve files from my local server but will cache them to reduce load on my ISP. If my home server is down, it can return a 502 error with a friendly message indicating to the user to try again later, my home server being a VM on my Threadripper desktop that I sometimes turn off when I need the horsepower for something else.
Ultimately an availability needs and cost management deal. Rented servers are expensive, so I try to keep the footprint to a minimum. Ephemeral stuff or stuff only I or a handful of friends need, that can live on my desktop. Like, worst case my Minecraft server is down and someone has to message me on IRC to ask me to turn it on so they can play a bit. I don’t need to pay for a beefy VPS to run that 24/7, but I do pay for a $5 VPS to host my DNS and emails and basic web server because those services need to be up 24/7 so I get my emails, especially for work.