Small, owned infrastructure keeps winning mindshare

"What do you run on a $5 VPS?" produced a long list: family IMAP mail, authoritative DNS, message queues, VPN endpoints, hole-punching servers for self-built chat, and a language-learning app on a free Oracle box. One person vibe-coded their own chat after seeing too many chat services disappear or hit a paywall. DuckDB's DuckLake and the Hetzner Cloud network stack write-up drew the same crowd, along with a cache CLI called Once. Meanwhile a coffee machine that used 1TB of data in 10 days showed the cost of IoT devices nobody controls, and an old FCC thread on IoT security updates came back up.

Older threads in the batch show why people want this. Cloudflare's football blocking in Spain broke Docker pulls, an AWS billing bug showed users bills in the billions, and a Stripe account freeze shows platform risk. The lesson people draw is to run small things yourself, and to avoid depending on one provider for anything critical.

The tradeoff is that self-hosting is maintenance, and commenters admit most of their servers run for months without attention, which is also how they get forgotten.