Start Self Hosting

To do this right you should also think of backups, updates, and monitoring. Self-hosting is true freedom but doing it right for things like email is akin to running a small business. On the positive side docker makes many things a breeze.

I did this once. Don't overthink it too much - yes, it is as simple as finding a rack with sufficient space, power and network, plugging it in and going. You'll most likely get a public IP and have no access to your neighbors, so they won't really care what you do with it as long as it's not illegal or against the Terms of Service for your host. So yeah, if you want to do it, just do it. Get an OS you know, install an SSH server or Remote Desktop, and rack it up. If you can get to it on your LAN, you'll be able to get to it on the public Internet. Also, quickly learn about good auth and firewalls and fail2ban.

That all said (and said with the clarity of age and knowing I was a stubborn kid who did things "because I could"), the experience of spinning up a VPS today on Linode or Digital Ocean is effectively the same, infinitely cheaper, and a lot more fun than racking a server somewhere. I can script up a fleet of servers from my bed at 1am just because, and can't tell the difference between SSH'ing to them versus that one box I did 15 years ago. If you want to do it, go nuts and have fun, but you really aren't really missing much over conventional VPSes these days.

I love promoting self-hosting.. self-host, self-host, self-host!

Having said that, I'd say: Chose your battles wisely...

You can run your hardware in X number of physical locations that you have access to (personal house, family etc.). But that doesn't always suffice for backups, so go with an additional cloud provider for additional backups.

Emails: Do you want to be hit with tonnes of spam traps because you're an unknown IP (any individual doesn't send email emails to 'warm-up' your IP). Do you want to lose emails because your personal server had a power-cut or internet connection drop?

Monitoring: I'd said for small-medium personal setups, to get the level of monitoring, central logging and intrusion detection detection that someone (at least for me) would be comfortable with in the current age, a fair chunk of computing power goes to this. Maybe you'd use an external vendor for monitoring, since your home server monitoring itself won't detect if it goes out.

Instant messaging: For IOS, at least, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to send notifications to devices - should you use an external service for this?

Honestly, I'm rambling, but.. I absolutely recommend self-hosting everything.. but I think a foreword about the amount of effort that needs to go into setting up services that you rely on a daily basis is (or should be) pretty high.

I.e. if I were wanting to setup a single service for myself that I _heavily_ relied on.. I probably wouldn't do it. If I wanted a bunch of applications.. serving 5 applications from a k8s cluster and some additional work for monitoring, log management, backups and other bits and pieces probably starts making sense.

On another note, for me, hosting things on your own, especially for data/services that you truly care about, sometimes can have a keep-you-up-at-night feeling of "you don't know what you don't know".. what if someone is in my network.. what if there's a vulnerability in the VPN, firewall and X, Y Z that hasn't been patched and someone is on my machine deleting/stealing my data. There's also people at lot more clever than you in the world and plenty of people writing scripts to automatically break into services that require a little more knowledge than you have on the subject (whatever the attack vector maybe).

Sadly the answer is, as often, it depends!

Many rack space rentals will not permit you to just install whatever PC you fancy because it is potentially a risk to the neighbours in terms of fire or bad hardware, most will happily quote you to buy one their approved ones!

It is pretty easy to get a rack space provider where the provider cannot access the machine but this can be good or bad. In some cases, I would rather they could shutdown the host if, say, the RAM is broken and replace it but if you would prefer to do this yourself, that is fine.

In most cases, you will be given a public IP address directly mapping to your machine via a router/nat lookup so whatever services you open on your machine are open on that public IP address so pretty easy to setup RDP/ssh/whatever.

Probably the biggest issue though is the extra work or hassle if something goes wrong. I remember at a previous company where some guy would frequently have to drive for 30 minutes each way to go to a data centre to perform certain updates that couldn't be done remotely.

YMMV

Seems like you could do this pretty easily with a Docker image and a config file. Actually, I've done this with AWS (use a pre-existing image to get some open source wiki software up and running, which I then customized)+