No I’m trying to use it with my work phone. I can’t connect my personal phone to the work wifi since it needs a certificate (802.1x) but there’s a separate guest network I can use if needed. Guest network is entirely isolated - different hardware, different backhaul, different IP range.

I love KDE Connect but I can’t figure out how to get it to work at work. Probably some firewall thing. It works fine at home, but can’t find my phone at work.

Why not Matrix via Conduit?

100% agree. Note that some cheap VPS providers are single-homed (only have one internet connection) with a budget provider like Cogent, but the good ones are usually multihomed.

Hetzner are great. One of the providers I use (HostHatch) is trying to have pricing similar to Hetzner, but in a larger number of locations. Their sale pricing during Black Friday is even better though.

I agree with you :)

Even on the same network, I like having a Zigbee coordinator with an Ethernet port. I put it in a more central location in my house, which helped improve the network quality.

As others have mentioned, VPSes (and rented dedicated servers) count as self-hosted. In many situations, a VPS can make more sense than a home server:

• Better internet connection - a lot of hosts have 40Gbps connections now, and it’s a data center grade connection with a lower contention ratio.
• Cheaper upfront - no initial purchase cost.
• Depending on electricity prices, it can be cheaper over the long run too, especially with a $20-40/year one (see LowEndTalk, GreenCloudVPS Budget KVM, RackNerd specials, etc). That’s the case for me in California - just the electricity for my home server costs more than some of my VPSes.
• Usually better hardware than you’d have at home - often AMD EPYC or modern Xeons (not a 10 year old E3 or E5), enterprise NVMe SSDs, etc.

AWS is very expensive compared to regular VPS services, and you only really get a benefit from it if you use a lot of different AWS services in a multiple regions. One EC2 instance in one region doesn’t really have advantages over a regular VPS.

If you do want to use AWS, consider using Lightsail. It’s like a regular VPS and has a fixed monthly price for some amount of disk space, CPU, and monthly transfer, father than being dynamically priced.

my Home Assistant server with z-wave, which needs to be physically nearby my other stuff

Not sure about Z-wave, but with Zigbee it’s possible to get coordinators with Ethernet ports (and this is generally recommended over USB ones due to the added flexibility), so your Home Assistant server doesn’t actually have to be near your Zigbee network, just the coordinator does.

You can do quite a bit with 4GB RAM. A lot of people use VPSes with 4GB (or less) RAM for web hosting, small database servers, backups, etc. Big providers like DigitalOcean tend to have 1GB RAM in their lowest plans.

Just keep an eye on the power usage, depending on how expensive electricity is in your area. I live in California which has very expensive electricity, and buying newer, more power efficient hardware works out cheaper than 10+ year old Xeons over the long run, even if you get the Xeon system for free.

Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to get a motherboard with IPMI/BMC? Last I looked, the prebuilt PiKVMs were quite expensive.

No one else uses the term “cloud” like that

Broadly, “the cloud” is just someone else’s computer. VPSes still fall into that definition. A lot of VPS providers describe themselves as “cloud” now too (eg one of the main hosts I use, HostHatch, describes themselves that way on their site).

If a single AWS EC2 or Lightsail server (which is essentially just a VPS in one region) is considered to be “in the cloud”, why not a much cheaper, more powerful server with a different provider?

It could be their own cloud. I refer to my VPSes as “the cloud” even though that’s still self-hosting. My “cloud storage” would just be a 10TB storage VPS I’ve got.

I think it’s https://xkcd.com/1425/

On modern versions of Windows (and probably other OSes), you can configure it to use DNS over HTTPS with a service like Quad9 or Cloudflare, which will fix this.

To do this across all your devices, even those that don’t support DoH, install AdGuard Home on a home server or Raspberry Pi or your PC if it’s always on. ISPs can’t intercept DoH requests. Then configure your router to set the DNS server to your AdGuard Home server.