For a growing number of reasons, as with most people here, I am more desirous of self-hosted solutions to replace proprietary ones, yet, as with many others, I am not in a position to fully self-host with a server at home. Any comments on kinda-self-host, where you rent a server from a third party and do all the same shenanigans on it? Specifically, I’m thinking of data storage and streaming.
Please share any information resources if you can.
I’ve been a customer of SoYouStart, now the OVH Eco series for many years. For $30/mo, I get 32GB of RAM and 480GB of disk space. Plenty of space for me to run my too many different services.
I’ve found them cost effective
Data storage: you can do pretty much whatever, they won’t look at your stuff unless you do something that attracts attention. Of course encrypt it anyway.
Streaming: yes that attracts attention if you stream to the public. If it’s edgy or pirated content you can’t use the big providers. If it’s your private collection that only a few people know about, it’s like the situation with storage.
no shame in getting a VPS. it might cost you more over the long term if you want to run any real workloads or store anything on it.
what i would do is get your hands on some sort of computer you can attach storage to.
what i do is i have a small VPS that i expose to the internet that routes traffic to my home server(s) over my Tailscale VPN. that way i get the benefit of having a stable public IP, some traffic protection from the provider, and a stable failsafe in case my home internet or power or whatever goes out, and it’s a lot cheaper to run workloads and store files on my local machines than to rent all that out. my workloads can be pretty heavy, so i would end up paying hundreds if not over $1k per year, which is easily enough for a machine that can do most anything you need.