What are your favourite, or least favourite but necessary, cost-cutting methods?
I feel I am spending too many resources on unnecessary stuff.
Edit: I feel the need to reduce both – the resources, to host multiple things on one system, and cost, to buy/pay for multiple systems. Currently, I have 2 ARM VPSes and 1 old MacBook Air as a home server.
Two reasons, basically. First, I am behind CGNAT. Second, electricity in my area is somewhat cumbersome, I need some services to be always online.
These days you can use various services to expose your devices from behind cgnat:
They rely on TLS-termination. I self-host for privacy, so I need TLS-passthrough. Cloudflare wants me to buy their enterprise plans for that.
If you want TLS passthrough, then the most cost effective option is to keep one of your arm vps and run haproxy there. You can connect the vps and your home network using tailscale, zerotier, or plain old autossh tunnel.
Something that is usually forgotten is that cgnats are only there for ipv4. Running your server in ipv6 is almost a safe bet to have good connectivity.
And you know, these days getting a real ipv4 is more expensive than running in ipv6