> Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing things you love with people that matter to you.

Agreed, but it doesn't have to take time from your family. I'm on a small team that self-hosts internal services to lower costs/risks. It takes very little time to maintain, and maintenance windows happen on our terms. Our uptime this year is better than "Github Actions", the latency is incredible, and we've had no known security issues.

There are two keys to doing this successfully: (1) don't deploy anything you don't understand (so it won't take you long to fix), and (2) even then, aggressively avoid complexity (so it doesn't break in the first place.)

For example, despite significant network expertise, we stuck to a basic COTS router and a simple IPv4 subnet for our servers. And the services we run are typically self-contained golang binaries that we can deploy with bash onto baremetal. No docker, kvm, ansible, or k8s.

This DIY setup saves us considerably more than it costs. Not for everyone, but with proper scoping, many readers of hacker news could pull this off without losing time with their loved ones.