I have been on the same boat a while ago. Of course it was a deployment that caught on and was serving longer than expected.

I don’t recall how many versions I skipped exactly (1-2 years worth of updates). Of course no backups set what so ever.

I looked at change log of I need something specific, there were changes in docker compose file. Did my best effort to make it succeed.

My worst case scenario was that I will have to import everything again and made sure I have all my labels, tags and settings backed up.

Nowadays I’ll just snapshot the whole VM in Proxmox.

They have fairly good prices for small VPS, something like €1-2 and I cannot complain. Perfect for some small self hosting. I cannot comment on their more performant boxes.

1&1 is kind of typical telco, with all the shady stuff and contracts. DSL from them is without any issues. Mobile is kind of problematic, it was fine for past 3-4 years but with their “Fancy 5G net up to 300mbps” has pretty shit so far. Last week I was abroad and my sim would not connect at all. Contacted them via online chat and they said to call them… They fixed it after like 20h

It’s difficult to understand the move against custom ROMs. Especially considering the size of market for “weridos” that will spend hundreds of dollars on a device and first thing they do with it is unlocking bootloader.

Take that away and you go head to head against Samsung and Apple. And you will not win.

There is a hidden cost to every hobby and everybody is willing to tolerate a certain degree of shittyness.

I have a friends that has a rather old car and something on it is always broken. But he has no problem having 20 different apps for appliances, instead of deploying home assistants. Or having ads everywhere and even trying pihole or at least NextDNS.

On the other hand, I see my car as a transportation tool and when I need it I want to use it without worrying about some random part exploding. But I have no problem running Proxmox and hosting tons of services for my family.

That said, I would definitely not self-host something like NextCloud or any business critical component for my business and just paid somebody for the service.

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Take what you have, start small and learn from it.

Old laptops are great, because they have low power consumption and even pretty used up battery will give you power redundancy.

Even a 10yo laptop is something with 4-5th gen Core cpu and that has plenty of power to get you started.

Got 3060 in a laptop. Updating is like a box of chocolate. You never know what will break.

On the other hand… 6800XT in my desktop. No issues whatsoever in the last 4 years. It just works since I installed it.