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?
Right or wrong, the line I draw is “will I need to use this if I’m away from my home network?” If the answer’s “yes,” then I go with a VPS. I’m sure lots of people are angrily pounding their keyboard telling me to use Tailscale, but I have no interest in hacking/tweaking my home network’s infrastructure.
I’m not angrily typing this but I’m curious why not Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunneling? You get built-in authentication and don’t need to worry about dynamic ips. It’s pretty game changing for me as far as self-hosting goes. It also doesn’t require you to change your network infra as long as the host has some sort of connection to the Internet.
This didn’t come to mind when I wrote my comment, but there’s also a “workflow friction” element. Most VPS providers have 1-click installs for the majority of the apps that I want/need to run, and I’m more of a developer than a sys admin. So I don’t really get anything out of figuring out how to do it, it just becomes another headache-inducing barrier to implement the stuff I need.
A VPS will always have a better uptime, bandwidth and latency than your home network, because of it’s enterprise grade carrier. And the electric costs to run everything at home are never mentioned, but they are real when you run many services.
I host everything on a VPS for these reasons.