> why go through all the trouble of setting this up instead of just using AWS I will never understand that mentality. Maybe I always was to poor to pay for the

> why go through all the trouble of setting this up instead of just using AWS I will never understand that mentality. Maybe I always was to poor to pay for the cloud but a bunch of old notebooks, electricity a switch and internet is all you need to experiment and self-host. AWS is powerful if you need to scale but for homelab/experiments it's overkill - today I'd rather get an Oracle Cloud free account that gets you 24gb ram / 4 arm cores and 200gb storage and ipv4/ipv6 addresses, internal subnets for free to experiment if you need cloud.