Another sort-of-recent development in the space has made self-hosting dramatically more accessible: even though hardware costs were reasonable before, they're now _very_ reasonable and also resource-efficient.

Repurposing an old tower would offer you enough compute to self-host services back in the day, but now an Intel NUC has plenty of resources in a very small footprint and branching out into the Raspberry Pi-adjacent family of hardware also offers even smaller power draw on aarch64 SBCs.

One experiment in my own lab has been to deploy glusterfs across a fleet of ODroid HC4 devices to operate a distributed storage network. The devices sip small amounts of power, are easy to expand, and last week a disk died completely but I swapped the hardware out while never losing access to the data thanks to separate networked peers staying online while the downed host got new hardware.

Relying on container deployments rather than fat VMs also helps to compress resource requirements when operating lots of self-hosted services. I've got about ~20 nomad-operated services spread across various small, cheap aarch64 hosts that can go down without worrying about it because nomad will just pick a new one.