I spent a wet Sunday moving a clutch of my own services off a cloud VPS and back onto a box in the cupboard under the stairs. Not a grand statement about The Cloud, just arithmetic and a bit of stubbornness.
The VPS had crept up to about thirty pounds a month. For that I got a machine I didn't control, in a region that occasionally had a bad day, hosting things only I use: a bookmark archive, a small Postgres, a couple of static sites, an RSS aggregator, and the irc bouncer I've been running since approximately forever. None of it needs five nines. None of it needs to be anywhere in particular. So why was I paying rent on it?
The hardware was already there. An old NUC that does nothing but run a few containers, sat behind the router doing about eight watts at idle. The actual move was the easy part:
- Postgres:
pg_dumpon the VPS, restore at home, done in minutes. - The static sites and the archive: rsync of a data directory and a compose file.
- The bouncer: copy the config, repoint DNS, reconnect.
The genuinely fiddly bit was getting in from outside without exposing my home IP or poking holes in the firewall. I'd been putting this off for ages and it turned out to be a non-problem. A Tailscale tunnel for the things only I touch, and a single small reverse-proxy VPS (the cheapest tier, a couple of quid) for the one or two things that need a public address with a real certificate. The proxy holds no data and no secrets worth having; if it falls over, I rebuild it from a script in ten minutes.
So the cost went from thirty pounds to about three, plus eight watts of electricity which is lost in the noise of a house that also runs a fridge. The honest cost is in resilience. My home connection is not a datacentre. If the power blips or the ISP has a moment, my services blip too. For an irc bouncer and a bookmark archive, I can live with that. For anything anyone else relied on, I would not, and I'd happily pay the cloud to make it someone else's problem.
That's the whole calculus, really. Self-hosting at home is cheaper and more private and more fun, and less reliable, and the trick is being honest about which of your services actually care about that last word. Most of mine don't.