Self-Hosting like it's 2025

I'm slowly configuring my new VPS. Here's approach I'm taking:

1. RHEL 9 with Developer Subscription. Installed dnf-automatic, set `reboot = when-changed`, so it's zero effort to reliably apply all updates with daily reboots. One or two minutes of downtime, not a big deal.

2. For services: podman with quadlets. It's RH-flavoured replacement for docker-compose. Not sure, if I like it, but I guess that's the "future", so I'm embracing it. Every service is a custom-built image with common parent to reduce space waste (by reusing base OS layer).

So far I want to run static http (nginx), vaultwarden, postfix and some webmail. May be more in the future.

This setup wastes a lot of disk space for image data, so expect to order few more gigabytes of disk to pay for modern tech.

I run a few PostgreSQL instances in containers (Kubernetes via Bitnami Helm chart). I know running stateful databases is generally not best practice but for development/homelab and tinkering works great.

Bitnami PostgreSQL Helm chart - https://github.com/bitnami/charts/tree/main/bitnami/postgres...

What about Kamal? https://kamal-deploy.org/ Did anybody here use it for anything that is not a Ruby on Rails app?

i really like this software-centric approach, but I am a bit stuck when it comes to the hardware. Are there some sources around servers that don't suck up too much energy and are fairly quiet? What CPU is a good all-round solution?

I am actually worried about the self-hosting pandemic. We self-hosters will stop flying under the radar. Wonder how long it will take until our matrix instances require to be backdoored, our immich are scanning our pictures with AI.

On an unrelated note, an article of how to rent a VPS in China would be interesting :)