For years my personal bits and bobs lived on a single cloud VPS. Nothing exotic: a wiki, a couple of small web apps, a Git mirror, an RSS reader I refuse to give up. It cost about a tenner a month and I barely thought about it. Then I added a few things, the box got tight on RAM, the obvious move was to bump up a tier, and I sat there looking at the new monthly figure and thought: I have a perfectly good machine doing nothing in the cupboard under the stairs.
So I moved everything home. This is a write-up of why, and of the bits that were less obvious than the marketing for "self-hosting" suggests.
The maths that started it
The honest version is that the cloud was never expensive, it was just slowly creeping. A tenner became fifteen, fifteen wanted to become twenty-five, and the thing I was actually paying for was someone else worrying about the hardware. That is a real service and worth real money. But I have hardware, I enjoy worrying about it, and the spare machine has more cores and far more RAM than any VPS tier I would sensibly pay for.
What's actually hard
The compute was the trivial part. The two genuine problems with hosting at home are the same two everyone hits, and no amount of enthusiasm makes them go away.
The first is inbound connectivity. A domestic connection gives you a dynamic IP and, increasingly, no real way to accept inbound traffic without jumping through hoops. I run dynamic DNS to keep a name pointed at the right address, and I forward only the ports I genuinely need behind a reverse proxy. Anything I want reachable from outside goes through that one proxy with proper TLS, and everything else stays on the LAN where it belongs.
The second is that you are now the uptime. There is no support queue. If the power blips, or the disk in the array decides today is the day, that is your evening. I dealt with the power side with a small UPS that gives the box enough time to shut down cleanly, which is less about staying online through an outage and more about not corrupting a filesystem because the lights flickered.
Backups, because home is not a backup
The one place I did not cheap out: backups go off-site. The whole point of leaving the cloud was to stop paying rent on compute, not to put my only copy of everything in a cupboard that shares a fuse box with a kettle. So the data still lives in object storage somewhere far away, encrypted, and I sleep fine.
A month in, the cupboard is warm, the bills are smaller, and I have learnt more about my own network in a fortnight than in five years of paying someone else to care. Would I host a client's production service this way? No. For my own clutter, it has been a quiet pleasure.