It is only time consuming if you let it be: I have been there too, hosting each service in a different OpenVZ jails (before containers were a thing) and doing hyper complex stuff...

Nowadays I simplify to the extreme (refrain to run something I do not need, always using the simplest solution) and it works pretty well for me:https://benou.fr/www/ben/14-years-of-self-hosting.html

One hack in '99 is not bad really. Looks like you're doing a great job.

Don't forget that the whole DIY thing is also incredibly educational. People tend to forget that when weighing the pros and cons.

It's not always directly teaching useful skills for work as most companies will just want you to know how to talk to AWS. But general computing and security knowledge is always useful IMO.

I like seeing people acknowledge the problems that come with self-hosting. I tried to self-host a few years back ended up lasting only a handful of months before going back to letting others host the services I use.

I didn't run into any specific issues, but instead I ended up realizing that I had to monitor the services myself to ensure that they were still functioning properly and that they had security patches applied. That's not a responsibility I want to deal with.

And as strange as it sounds, I also noticed that there actually were privacy advantages to not hosting stuff myself. Maintaining multiple identities when self-hosting is only possible with a domain per identity and not reusing the same machine for services across identities.

Wow, you really need to write a how-to book and sell it on leanpub. I would buy it!