Why I Ran a Home Server for 3 Years Before Finally Moving to the Cloud
I bought a mini PC in 2021 and started running a home server. I ran Docker with Nextcloud, a VPN, photo backups, and a few toy projects, and I felt pretty proud of it. As a hobby, it was genuinely fun.
But from the second year, things started to go wrong. One disk died silently, and because I had misconfigured RAID, my backups almost got wiped along with it. I still remember the cold sweat. After that, I wrote backup scripts and set up monitoring, but the maintenance time gradually stopped feeling like a hobby and started feeling like homework.
The decisive moment came while I was traveling. The VPN wouldn't connect over the accommodation Wi-Fi, so I couldn't retrieve one urgent file. In that moment, I thought, "Okay, I need to stop this."
Now I've moved only my personal projects to a small cloud instance, and I've kept the NAS only for photo backups. It costs about 4,000 won a month—the price of a cup of coffee—and my stress is definitely lower.
A home server is the best as a hobby. But first ask yourself, "Do I enjoy managing this?" If you do, keep going. If not, going straight to the cloud from the start is the right call.
5 answers
Well, that's a bit... Isn't the VPN not connecting while traveling more of a network configuration issue than a home server problem? Drawing a conclusion from just that seems a bit hasty. For me, setting things up so I can access it well from outside actually makes it more convenient than the cloud.
Agreed. I also got a reality check after my disk died in my second year lol. Turns out the backup is the real machine, not the server.
The moment you add monitoring and write backup scripts, it’s no longer a hobby—it’s operations. That’s why I only put things on my home server that I’m fine losing if something breaks. I never upload original photos.