I was on a severely restricted budget and self hosted everything for 15+ years, while the heavily used part of the database was on a RAM card. The RAM drive was soft raided to a hard drive pair which were 3Ware raid1 hdds, just in case, and also did a daily backup on the database and during that time never had any data loss and never had to restore anything from backup. And my options were severely restricted due to a capped income.

The real downside wasn't technical. The constant background anxiety you had to learn to live with, since the hosted news sites were hammered by the users. The dreaded SMS alerts saying the server was inaccessible (often due to ISP issues) or going abroad meant persuading one of your mates to keep an eye on things just in case, created a lot of unnecessary stress.

AWS is quite good. It has everything you need and removes most of that operational burden, so the angst is much lower, but the pricing is problematic.

No, it will sink in an instant.

Why people use these abstractions over nftables? Use nftables, it's easy to learn, effective and if you know it you know everything about firewalls.

Plus the deliberately overcomplicated parts.

Holy bejesus, mandatory knitting classes incoming? They will go down the drain sooner rather than later. What have they done with modern doom, the infantilization, the totally mindwashed, empty shell or a story... Sigh.

Sigh, power user doesn't mean the individual is an alien with some quirky taste. Oh, the contrary. It means someone who has a wider spectrum and those who are not power users are still on the spectrum, but theirs is shorter, but overlap with the PU's. So if it is good for the power users it is almost always good for the rest of the world. Let that sink in.

If an RNG god exists, it will manifest soon, thanks to genAI, lol.

How come that crumbling, rotten to the core lua is still used? :D

PAR2 files have their beauty

Of course and then watch those companies reined in.