It's really not that hard to run a server with a handful of applications on it, especially for personal/home use. It seems to me that when developers talk about this kind of thing they often massively overstate how much work is involved in running a server and keeping it up to date while massively understating the inherent complexities of working with cloud services.

I haven't really witnessed the cloud serving as a big time saver in my career. Cloud-centric ops teams seem to be consistently larger than those running applications on regular, shmegular servers (whether rented or their own), if anything.

For self-hosting purposes, I'd expect serverless deployments of open-source apps to take more time for most people to figure out and get right than just running the same apps on a VPS, unless you had spent years deploying to the cloud at work and also never learned Linux usage basics. And if you deploy to a only a single cloud VM, you're just using an extremely overpriced VPS at that point.

I was brought up on private data centers and its much much simpler than using aws or gcp.

> I’ve found the opposite. Google drive costs me less than a VPS, and far less than a physical server to do the same job.

Can you share the web applications and databases you serve from your google drive? since you can "do the same job" and it costs less? You must be into something here.

Ignoring any privacy concerns for a moment. Neither the comment you're replying to, nor the submission is talking about just storing documents in a storage. They're hosting applications, databases, services which you need a "server" for and can't do in Google drive.

You might not the have the same use case, you might not need to host websites, databases, virtual machines, DNS, and other services, but then you're not doing "the same job". You just have a different use case. Just like you don't need an IDE if you just want to take notes.