I run a dozen PHP (Laravel) / MySQL / Redis apps on a single server which cost 45€ per month.

Applications each have their own FreeBSD jails, so they're isolated.

ZFS incremental replication on top of regular app backups provide a quick recovery process should the hardware of that machine fail.

Moving those apps to the cloud would cost orders of magnitude more, for benefits I don't need.

Modern tech stacks always remind me of this cartoon:

https://www.toontales.net/short/lumber-jerks/

Acme Toothpicks

How do you handle billing / payment processing?

Nice tech read, but without information about which companies, doing what, just feels way too click-baity.

This is similar to what I do. Linode, Debian, Go, HTMX, SQLite (with modernc.org/SQLite so I have no CGO dependency) and Caddy. If I have apps that need a lot of storage, I just add an S3 bucket.

> If you need a little breathing room, just use a swapfile.

You should always use a swap file/partition, even if you don't want any swapping. That's because there are always cold pages and if you have no swap space that memory cannot be used for apps or buffers, it's just wasted.

>>The optimal strategy is simple: write brutally detailed prompts with strict success criteria (which is best practice anyway), tell the agent to "keep going until all errors are fixed," hit enter, and go make a coffee while Satya Nadella subsidizes your compute costs.

100% agreed.

This is how every website used to be run before everyone fell four the cloud trap.

The biggest risk to cloud revenues is that everyone wakes up and realizes they could slash their cloud bills by 60+% quite quickly with just some minimal leaning.

I do appreciate the technical simplicity argument and I'm always advocating for it. And the few neat tricks i.e. Copilot.

That being said, I'd much rather read a few ideas for good recurring passive income. Instead, the author kind of flexes on that, then says "I get refused VC money because they don't see how their money would be useful for me" -- which is one more flex -- and moves on to the technical bits.

It's coming across as bragging to me.