- I get specs from an old laptop (that I had laying around anyway) that would probably cost like 50€/month to rent elsewhere. Power costs are much lower (iirc some 2€/month) and it just uses the internet subscription I already had anyway
- When I do hardware upgrades, I buy to own. No profit margin, dedicated hardware, exactly the parts I want
- All data is stored at home so I'm in control of access controls
- Gigabit transfer speeds at home, which is most of the time that I want to do bulk transfers
I see various advantages that still exist when you need to tunnel for IP-layer issues
Edit: got curious. At Hetzner, a shared cpu with 16GB RAM is 30€/month, but storage is way too little so an additional 53€/month just for a 1TB drive needs to be added (at that price, you could buy one of these drives new, every month again and again and still have enough money over to pay for the operating electricity; you'd have a fleet of 60 drives at the expected lifetime of 5 years, or even at triple redundancy you get 20TB for that price). I'll admit the uplink would be significantly better for this system, but then my downlink isn't faster than my uplink so at home I wouldn't even notice. Not sure how much of a difference a dedicated CPU would make
At AWS, I have to guess things like iops (I put in 0 to have a best-case comparison), bandwidth (I guessed 1TB outbound, probably some months is five times more, some months half). It says the cheapest EC2 instance with these specs, shared/virtual again mind you so no performance guarantees, is t4g.xlarge. With storage and traffic, this costs 301$/month which I guess is nearly the same in euros after conversion fees. If I generously pay 3 years up front, it's only 190$ monthly + 2'156$ up front, so across 3 years that's 250$/month (and I'm out of over 2 grand which has an expected average return of 270€ at the typical 4% in an all-world ETF — I could nearly fund the electricity costs of the old laptop just from the money I lose in interest while paying for AWS! Probably 100% if I bought a battery and solar panel to the value of 2150€)
I actually have more than 1TB storage but don't currently use all of it, so figured this is a fair comparison
The proxy I currently have at Hetzner costs me 4€/month, so I save many multiples of my current total cost (including the at-home costs) by self hosting.