I may need to do a proper write up on that one, as it’s quite a long story actually. The main thing is, though: it’s hard to believe how actually good modern hardware is. You can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, not to say Mac mini. Over the decades, I accumulated some old hardware which serves till it would break. And then I’d replace it with similar hardware, I guess. E.g. I have a media server, which is a simple lighttpd web server running on an obsolete Intel Atom computer. It’s slow, but it does its job at serving files. I have old MacBook Pro hosting my Immich library.
All that is rather a self-hosted territory, but I’m pretty confident I can host a production grade stuff off my own hardware. I have been using the cheapest options at DO/Hetzner, so I definitely can host off a maxed out Mac mini or similar.
All that lives at home, or in the office (I am allowed to have some hardware there). I think the main restriction is the gigabit internet… but hey! That’s plenty too!
If I’d ever come to some serious level of hosting, yes, I think I’d co-locate at some data centre. I see very little need in cloud services, as all I need can be done with the bare metal. And it’s so much fun! Feels like magic, seeing an old laptop you’d throw out otherwise, serving as what would be a full-blown server just two decades ago.
Unfortunately, where I am, prices aren’t that generous, but I have an unusual interest in very old hardware, so most of my servers can be bought for like $20 or less. Most of them are junk hardware nobody needs. They’re very useful for many cases, especially if we talk self-hosting / personal servers. I bet you can easily serve a small community with a $20 computer. Recently, I started being very picky about power consumption (we have massive blackouts here in Ukraine, due to the Nazi terrorist state, Russia, shelling our civilian infrastructure; but not just that: power efficient hardware is better for the planet), but one thing that isn’t obvious: you can keep the hardware off when unused. It’s trivial to turn it on, or wake up, depending on the use case.
So, if anyone new reading this, I urge you to try this with any spare computer you can find. You may be surprised how good it may work with Linux (server or even desktop).