When I’m home it is usually my wife that notices first. That said, when I’m away from home I almost immediately notice any issues. My self hosted services are the backend for almost everything I use. Just need to find a decent replacement for GoodNotes on iOS.
Personally, I use Gitea. My needs are simple though and I probably don’t use 99% of what it can do.
Without knowing your system utilization numbers it’s impossible to give good recommendations.
I recently upgraded my system from a 4th gen i5 with 8 GB ram (Main board maxed) to a 6th gen i5 with 64 GB of ram (Again max out the main board).
Before the upgrade I was sitting at 95% ram usage + 3 GB swap usage with the proc averaging 0.56 load, io wait was averaging 30%. In other words, I was clearly RAM bound.
After the full body transplant, I was using 23 GB ram with a 1.52 load average and 0 swap. Io wait at 3%.Not enough time for averages yet, but there was night and day difference in application performance.
Let your system stats dictate what you need to upgrade.
Sustainably? They don’t (mostly). Most are either pet projects, paid for out of pocket by the instance owner or run off donations. Neither are particularly sustainable long term, with rare exceptions like sdf.org.
The SDF runs just about every federated service you can think of, and has done so since the 1980s, run almost entirely off donations. Started as a dialup BBS (still active).
Same for iOS with the added pain that iOS will kill the background process if you don’t open it back up from time to time.
Edit: spelling
That, and you have to take into account each person’s available hardware and resources.
I have an under powered 10 year old desktop, a resonably specd 5 year old laptop with a busted screen, and 8 Raspberry Pi’s (3s and 4s). And can’t currently afford better hardware.Sometimes clustering those Pi’s makes sense.
You can use whatever you have to hand.
My issue wasn’t quite that easy but it wasn’t as headache inducing as I had thought. Turns out, last time I had rejiggered my services I had failed to delete a now unused fstab entry. One pound sign, save file and a reboot later and everything was back up and running correctly. I lucked out! Now tiem to move my Nextcloud backups off that machine!
Nice!
Personally, I think yes, it is worth it, However your friends bookkeeper might shit a brick. Building up IT infrastructure from the ground up is not cheap. Although storage cost is coming down.
Seriously, running with Google and company will be cheaper in the short term. What you can potentially gain doing it yourself however is resilience from catastrophic 3rd party events. If your not dependent on a third party for your IT infra, it doesn’t matter what they do, or don’t do. For a recent example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/influxdata-apologizes-for-deleting-cloud-regions-without-performing-scream-test/ar-AA1dIPX2