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.
Running stuff on my bare metal servers is my go to cost saving measure. Why rent 2 VPSes if you can buy some old thin clients and turn them into linux servers, etc.
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:
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
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.