I have been running my own personal servers in a similar setup for the last 10 years. Have turned on automatic updates, including automatic reboot, and everythi

I have been running my own personal servers in a similar setup for the last 10 years. Have turned on automatic updates, including automatic reboot, and everything runs in docker (using docker-compose). I can not remember a single time something bad or unexpected happened. Only the planned things - upgrading the distro every couple of years, and updating major versions of the things running in containers probably once a year or two. And maybe sometimes some unplanned updates if particularly bad vulnerability gets disclosed in a popular software/library. I am pretty sure I don't spend more than a few days per year to manage it. If I had opted for a cloud vendor managed alternative, it would have been so much more expensive. I have definitely saved thousands or tens of thousands over the last 10 years. But then again, I know how to manage it and I planned it out so it would not cause too much trouble for me. Prior to this setup I endured many painful moments and that "wasted time" allowed me to think of a better way to manage it and avoid certain problems along the way. Also available tooling has improved a lot. Then again - this is for my personal projects and I would do it somewhat differently for large projects.