I've gone down a real rabbit hole of self-hosting my own services. It all started when I started adding video rendering to stratbase and needed a dedicated machine to render out nade videos. I also needed some storage for demo files and faster processing of said demo files. I could either spend a fortune on a cloud server or build my own.

I bought 24TB (4x6TB) of refurbished ex-datacenter hard drives, an i7-12700K and a massive case from Facebook Marketplace and stuck everything inside. Topped it off with two GTX 1050Tis to handle graphics and now a core piece of Stratbase infrastructure runs on hardware I own. Proxmox orchestrates the virtual machines and handles ZFS (RAIDZ2) for me. It's worked near flawlessly.

A year or so later, I decided I wanted to put mine and my family's data in my own hands too. So I built another machine, this time with an old i5-8600k from my old gaming PC, another 24TB of refurbished drives and whatever RAM I could find lying around. This one hosts Immich (to replace Google Photos), NextCloud (to replace Google Drive/Docs), Vaultwarden (to replace my password manager), Jellyfin (for media) and a handful of other tools, including clipbin. This one runs on TrueNAS scale and has nightly backups to s3 compatible storage so in the event of a disaster my data is safe.