I used to host company stuff on a single physical server I built and put in the datacenter. After some time (and traffic overload) I redid and migrated the comp

I used to host company stuff on a single physical server I built and put in the datacenter. After some time (and traffic overload) I redid and migrated the company stuff into the Kubernetes and cloud but I still kept the server for personal services and it is still running as we speak. I just had to switch one RAID drive on-line during all those years.. It is a bit costly, but hosts NextCloud photos, files, contacts, calendars, tasks there. Dovecot and Exim for native email, Roundcube webmail, LDAP and even authoritative Bind for couple of domains with a secondary replica on a VPS. Also gitolite git repo hosting, wireguard. I use those self-hosted services daily from android, my laptop and desktop. It is the real bare metal thing. It has some AppArmor policies, fail2ban, some docker containers too. Yes, it took a lot of time, configuration, constant small improvements, adding stuff one by one, DKIM, DMARC, DNSSEC, etc, it needs upgrades now and then but the hard part was mainly done at the beginning! Huge upfront cost and probably not for an ordinary hobbyist, true. But now the maintanence is quite ok. I can even SSH into it any time from Termux android terminal if I need to do something quick on the go or download something fast for backup via the server optical datalink. Most people were lazy, they decided to go clouds and cloud hosted services fast, they took shortcuts and now we have what we see today. There used to be a funny Microsoft tale ad [1] where a family was proud to have a server in the house. :xD While I am not a fan of Microsoft, this also inspired me to go this self-hosting (pain) way and learn a lot along the way. :) [1] http://www.jimhaven.com/microsoft-stay-at-home-server http://www.jimhaven.com/microsoft-stay-at-home-server