Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

Just a note on power consumption with regard to heat output. Electric resistive heating is 100% efficient with regard to electricity from the socket. This is the upper limit on efficiency for a computer. This ignores efficiency losses from transmission and from electricity generation. If your electricity is generated by fossil fuels, you are getting much less than 100% efficiency from the energy stored in those fuels.

Heat pumps can achieve greater than 100% efficiency relative to electric resistive heating, because they move heat, rather than do work to create heat. These can achieve equivalent heating at 50% of the electricity utilization compared to resistive heating.[0]

Local fossil fuel heating (e.g. natural gas furnace) is much more efficient than electric resistive heating. The efficiency of local fossil fuel combustion is close to 100% of the energy content of the fuel, as it is turned directly into heat and that heat is dissipated into the home. More than 60% of the energy content used to generate electricity is lost in the generation process in the US.[1]

So, the heat from a computer does offset heating costs, but at less than 100% efficiency. For a small fanless machine, this is not likely to be a large expenditure, but it is valuable to keep in mind that heat from electronics is not "free".

[0]: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-pump-systems [1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44436

I have a much simpler set-up, but I don't run everything on one server. I usually prefer having a separate VPS or dedicated server for each service, but this is starting to be a bit more costly than simply renting a powerful machine for everything.

One advantage of having everything scattered around is that not everything is going to go down at once (eg: a DDOS or even a traffic spike on your machine will kill all your sites/services if you only have one machine).

I use: - Percona PMM[0] - Database/server monitoring - Backups to BackBlaze B2 using cron jobs - Simple deployments, usually using SFTP to upload files (usually for LAMP applications, also running Node.js apps using pm2 that can listen to file changes and restart the app)

I am actually working on creating some tools/scripts/guides to aid with self-hosting (for backing up stuff, uptime monitoring, alerting).

Yes it is. Install e.g. ubuntu, install the services, done. Every other mentioned problem is a problem of your provider, not of your setup.