I was hoping to hear peoples justifications for a VPS over a mini PC.
I've been really happy after upgrading my home server from a Pi to a Beelink Mini a couple of years ago. Pays itself off pretty quickly once you factor in your subscription savings and you own the hardware, have very fast local streaming on your LAN and avoid having to trust yet another third party.
Uptime is my justification.
I do put most things on my home box (certainly can't put my media server data on $5 VPS!), but stuff like my XMPP server, websites, etc. that I want available even when my power or Internet goes out live on a VPS.
For me it's not exactly "uptime" I care about, but the fact that if there's a power cut on the first day of a 2-week trip, my home server is then offline for the duration. I don't mind sporadic downtime if I'm home and can fix it at my convenience, but it's pretty inconvenient if I'm not home and can't fix something I rely on.
(That being said, I don't actually use a VPS, I just pay for SaaS apps for things I don't want to self-host for the reason above.)
I'm curious why do you need manual intervention after a power cut. Isn't configuring bios enough for this?
1. Power cuts typically aren't clean off and back-on events — they're often e.g. in storms and involve intermittent losses and/or restorations. I don't really want my devices trying to boot up again every time the power flickers.
2. A number of my devices are on battery backup of some sort — they'll cleanly shut down on low-battery, but turning back on when power is restored is non-trivial in this case.
3. Sometimes a device won't come back cleanly after reboot and will require some manual intervention.
Mini PC is great for private/tailscale use. If you have a mini PC or rpi open to the public internet, you need to worry about the "vulnpocalypse" pwning your whole LAN and every machine on it.
Yep, I have a decently powerful home server that's always on, but still run a cheap VPS for directly public services like my sites. I don't think it's particularly likely that the home server would get hacked if updates were to br kept up with, but why risk it for that little money?
I use Cloudflare tunnels for anything I want to expose to the internet, that gives me enough peace of mind, though I understand a VPS would be the least-risk and highest-uptime option, my risk profile and uptime requirements don't make it necessary.
Cloudflare tunnels work pretty well for this, tho. That with vlan or diff lan and it’s mostly fine.
We went the other way. A Raspberry Pi at home, a Cloudflare Tunnel in front, no VPS. It serves a public API over SEC Form 4 purchases.