I recently got a zimaboard2 and have been blown away how powerful it is, x86 and 16GB I think it was around 250$. I have it running proxmox. Dedicated GPU for transcoding, all working out of the box with the ZimaOS.. And no AI needed.

Author fails to recognize the fact that CLI agents make all kind of hoisting easier and fun. Like publishing to CloudFlare Pages which costs close to nothing and now takes seconds, while previously could taker days.

I had problems with tailscale being flaky about a year ago and it would stop responding taking down networking with it. I've since ripped it out and went with a VPS based wireguard for all PCs and mobiles. Stable since then.

I started self-hosting after noticing that my AWS bill increased from like $300 per month to $600 per month within a couple of years. When looking at my bill, 3/4 of the cost was 'AWS Other'; mostly bandwidth. I couldn't understand why I was paying so much for bandwidth given that all my database instances ran on the same host as the app servers and I didn't have any regular communication between instances.

I suspect it may have been related to the Network File System (NFS)? Like whenever I read a file on the host machine, it goes across the data-center network and charges me? Is this correct?

Anyway, I just decided to take control of those costs. Took me 2 weeks of part-time work to migrate all my stuff to a self-hosted machine. I put everything behind Cloudflare with a load balancer. Was a bit tricky to configure as I'm hosting multiple domains from the same machine. It's a small form factor PC tower with 20 CPU cores; easily runs all my stuff though. In 2 months, I already recouped the full cost of the machine through savings in my AWS bill. Now I pay like $10 a month to Cloudflare and even that's basically an optional cost. I strongly recommend.

Anyway it's impressive how AWS costs had been creeping slowly and imperceptibly over time. With my own machine, I now have way more compute than I need. I did a calculation and figured out that to get the same CPU capacity (no throttling, no bandwidth limitations) on AWS, I would have to pay like $1400 per month... But amortized over 4 years my machine's cost is like $20 per month plus $5 per month to get a static IP address. I didn't need to change my internet plan other than that. So AWS EC2 represented a 56x cost factor. It's mind-boggling.

I think it's one of these costs that I kind of brushed under the carpet as "It's an investment." But eventually, this cost became a topic of conversation with my wife and she started making jokes about our contribution to Jeff Bezos' wife's diamond ring. Then it came to our attention that his megayacht is so large that it comes with a second yacht beside it. Then I understood where he got it all from. Though to be fair to him, he is a truly great businessman; he didn't get it from institutional money or complex hidden political scheme; he got it fair and square through a very clever business plan.

Over 5 years or so that I've been using AWS, the costs had been flat. Meanwhile the costs of the underlying hardware had dropped to like 1/56th... and I didn't even notice. Is anything more profitable than apathy and neglect?

No, 2026 is definitely not the year of home servers, because hardware has become too expensive.

Maybe viable if you have a bunch of spare parts laying around. But probably not when RAM and storage prices are off the charts!

I used Claude Code just yesterday in a similar way: to solve a computer problem that I previously would have tried googling.

I had a 30-year-old file on my Mac that I wanted to read the content of. I had created it in some kind of word processing software, but I couldn’t remember which (Nexus? Word? MacWrite? ClarisWorks? EGWORD?) and the file didn’t have an extension. I couldn’t read its content in any of the applications I have on my Mac now.

So I pointed CC at it and asked what it could tell me about the file. It looked inside the file data, identified the file type and the multiple character encodings in it, and went through a couple of conversion steps before outputting as clean plain text what I had written in 1996.

Maybe I could have found a utility on the web to do the same thing, but CC felt much quicker and easier.

I also started started experimenting with self-hosting in the last few years. Started with a simple Plex server, then gradually evolved my little setup into a handful of open-source apps that now cover most of what I use during my day to day.

There are a few important things to consider, like unstable IPs, home internet limits, and the occasional power issue. Cloud providers felt overpriced for what I needed, especially once storage was factored in.

In the end, I put together a small business where people can run their own Mac mini with a static IP: https://www.minimahost.com/

I’m continuing to work on it while keeping my regular software job. So far, the demand is not very high, or perhaps I am not great at marketing XD

Remember: In all likelihood, your residential ISP does not permit you to operate a server.

Granted, that's rarely enforced, but if you're a stickler for that sort of thing, check your ISP's Acceptable Use Policy.

This is great and echoes my experience. Although I would add a caveat that this mostly applies to solo work. Once you need to collaborate or operate on a team, many of limits of self-hosting return.

Telling us you did all this without sharing how is just bragging.