How do you deal with the high costs of running an RDS instance? I think almost $30 p/m is a bit high for a small single family NC instance, when the EC2 instance running the actual service is going to a fraction of that.

That's a good question. Yeah, maybe not the best setup for everyone. You are right, the cost of a t3.small on-demand is close to $30/month, just for your NC instance alone that's not worth it.

In my case, for purposes of hobby projects and various self hosted services, I keep both MySQL & Postgres RDS instances running in perpetuity, both t3a.micro. On demand pricing is roughly $13/month, but since I plan on keeping them running 'forever' I purchase reserved instances. For a 3 year plan, 'no-upfront', this brings the cost down to about $8.75/month. Much more palatable if you ask me :)

Also, I use them for multiple projects, so the convenience factor is worth it for me. For your NC alone, I imagine it would be good enough to just run you DB server on the same EC2 instance. I doubt the database storage would eat up much disk space.

You could however, rip through a ton of disk space from file storage, so I feel like S3 buckets are a must, and cheap anyway.

My physical home server is a nuc. Could also be a Raspberry Pi 4, little hardware skill required :)