Hey! Author here! It's been 3 years since I wrote this article. I realized pretty soon I don't need as much resources. I think I'm at 17 bucks per month currently, and I have several more projects running.

I really don't get people selfhosting on a VPS. Defeats the purpose of independence/privacy, limited resources, a few months of bills would cover hardware and electricity.

Hosting some services on a vps provides far better availability of data, than doing it at home. Especially when you need it the most. For example when you are moving to a new home, and need to save documents, or you are abroad, need a document and there is a power outage at home.

Even if you have to trust a 3rd party with your data, (1) you can minimize the privacy risk with encryption and (2) usually VPS/cloud providers have different privacy guaranties than free Google drive...

I have moved a lot of stuff from vps to my home server but I use mine as a glorified reverse proxy for home services with appropriate firewall rules, hosting my website, Adguard dns over https, and Borg backup source. $130cdn/yr.

I'm hosting all of this and more on one old x260 thinkpad with 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory gathering dust in my basement. And an external disk for backup. Total cost? 500 euros or so?