I spent a wet Saturday moving a few personal services off a rented VPS and back onto a small box in the cupboard under the stairs. Nothing dramatic: a DNS resolver, a couple of cron-driven scrapers, my password vault sync, the bookmarking thing nobody else uses. The sort of services that have no business costing me a tenner a month each, and yet somehow were.
The honest motivation was not cost, though the cost was silly. It was that I had stopped understanding where my own data lived. Every service was a different provider, a different dashboard, a different invoice, a different idea of what a backup meant. Pulling them home meant one machine, one backup job, one place to look when something broke.
The box itself is unglamorous, an old NUC with a single SSD and far too much RAM for what it does. Docker Compose, a reverse proxy doing TLS, and a nightly restic snapshot to a remote bucket so I am not betting the lot on one disk in a cupboard. It is not high availability and it does not need to be. If the bookmarking thing is down for an hour while I reboot, the universe continues.
What surprised me is how much calmer it feels. The latency is better because the resolver is on the same LAN. The bill is gone. And there is a particular satisfaction, slightly embarrassing to admit, in ssh-ing into a thing you can physically touch. Not everything belongs at home, the public-facing stuff stays where the uptime guarantees are someone else's problem. But the small, personal, low-stakes services? They were always happier here.