You're quite welcome. I'm not trying to dissuade you, just provide a point of view I've got from having felt the same way. I'm definitely not comparing to AWS,

You're quite welcome. I'm not trying to dissuade you, just provide a point of view I've got from having felt the same way. I'm definitely not comparing to AWS, because yeah those can get super expensive, super fast. What you're paying for with AWS is Amazon-tier stability (whatever that's worth these days), but the difference in uptime between them and a Linode is more than fine for my needs. With your $50/mo, make sure that includes power - Xeons eat watts. Also, be sure to compare apples-to-apples on bandwidth. By comparison, Linode's dedicated CPU plan (not shared, closer to bare metal, but still not) starts at $30 for 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM and 4TB of transfer, and they'll take care of keeping you on the latest hardware. Again, I don't want to dissuade you, because colo is fun and it's cool to think about your own box out in the world. If anything, I'm envious of how easy it is nowadays compared to when I drove 3 hours to South Bend, Indiana to colo a box of my own, or the first time I needed to engage remote hands because the box got in an irreparable state.