I’m hosting on DigitalOcean and buy the URL somewhere else (GoDaddy in my case). If DO becomes to expensive under load I’ll move to AWS. Have done this with a few other projects the same way: start out and tinker, finding a good setup on DO and move to AWS for price efficiency.

It is the same for eBooks imo. There are some sources of DRM free eBooks, but they don’t tend to have the popular books. I’m always buying on kindle, because it is so laughably easy to circumvent their DRM as long as one has a kindle serial number attached to their account.

haha, I have the same experience tbh, but I still get the obvious “I don’t want to update my drivers or fiddle with settings and controls, I just want something that works”, responses. I don’t even recognize these topics as “pain” anymore, but this probably just shows how high my tolerance has become in the last decades.

Totally, this means even more pain one has to like a little.

I always compare self hosting to PC gaming: it has some very specific benefits, but you don’t even comprehend, how many downsides you will encounter you cannot even start to anticipate. If one doesn’t like the pain a little bit theses hobbies aren’t any good and I totally understand everyone giving up on them.