I’ve been around selfhosting most of my life and have seen a variety of different setups and reasons for selfhosting. For myself, I don’t really self host as mant services for myself as I do infrastructure. I like to build out the things that are usually invisible to people. I host some stuff that’s relatively visible, but most of my time is spent building an over engineered backbone for all the services I could theoretically host. For instance, full domain authentication and oversight with kerberized network storage, and both internal and public DNS.
The actual services I host? Mail and vaultwarden, with a few (i.e. < 3) more to come.
I absolutely do not need the level of infrastructure I need, but I honestly prefer that to the majority of possible things I could host. That’s the fun stuff to me; the meat and potatoes. But I know some people do focus more on the actual useful services they can host, or on achieving specific things with their self hosting. What types of things do you host and why?
Really?
I thought this was more the case with flexible providers like DigitalOcean. My current provider charges 5,36€ per month for 4 cores (though I assume this corresponds rather to 2 SMT-enabled cores), 6 GB of RAM and a 400 GB SSD. It offers better latency for most players (obviously not for myself) and in most cases has been sufficient regarding performance.
Fair, it does depend on what games you’re hosting. I often have multiple servers for different games running and some can use upwards of 10GB of RAM each when in use.
Highest I’ve had I think was an Avorion server that hit around 20GB of RAM usage with 5 or so players on.
I find that VPS cores are often very low performance cores, since they want high core density in their servers vs fewer high performance cores, and for games like Arma 3, Minecraft, Enshrouded, etc they really need high single thread performance to work well.