I've spent years happily paying someone else to run my computers, and mostly I'd do it again. But over the last few months I've been quietly moving a handful of personal services off rented instances and back onto the box in the cupboard, and it's been worth writing down why.
The trigger was boring: a renewal email. A small VPS that hosts a couple of toys had crept up in price, and when I added up all the little instances I was paying for, the monthly total was no longer in the noise. None of them were doing real work. A bookmarks app, a feed reader, an internal dashboard, a thing that pings other things. All of it would sit comfortably on the machine already humming away at home doing nothing for most of the day.
What moved, and what didn't
The rule I set myself was simple. Anything that only I or the household use, and that nobody outside relies on, comes home. Anything where downtime would actually inconvenience another human stays rented.
So the feed reader, the bookmarks, the dashboard and a couple of cron-shaped scripts came back. The one thing I host that other people occasionally hit stayed exactly where it was, because the whole point of paying someone is that my dodgy home internet isn't their problem.
The bit nobody mentions
Bringing things home isn't free, it's just a different bill. You pay in attention instead of money.
The reverse proxy and TLS were the easy part:
services:
caddy:
image: caddy:2
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- "443:443"
volumes:
- ./Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile
- caddy_data:/data
Caddy quietly handling certificates is one of those tools that's so good you forget it's there, which is the highest compliment I can pay infrastructure. The harder parts were the ones the cloud had been doing for me silently: backups that actually leave the building, a way back in when my home IP changes, and remembering that the power and the broadband at home are now part of my uptime story.
I leaned on a tunnel so I didn't have to expose anything directly, an off-site backup target so a burst pipe doesn't take my data with it, and a short runbook for myself because future-me will absolutely have forgotten how any of this works.
Was it worth it
For the money, marginally. The real win is different. These are my services now in a way they weren't when they were tenants on someone else's hardware. I can poke at them, break them, and fix them on a wet Sunday without a billing meter running.
I'm not evangelising. If your time is worth more than the difference, keep paying the rent and don't feel bad about it. But for the small, personal, nobody-else-depends-on-it stuff, home turned out to be the right place for it all along.