What is a fun gadget you have purchased that has added value to your life?

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A home server. Originally a Dell R710, now a custom built desktop.
If I can possibly self host something now I will do that over using big tech proprietary services. I feel free.
- Same. I'm almost completely off the cloud at this point and I love it.
- Just don't forget backups! I use Borgbackup for mine.
  I know some people don't want a home server because of the space it'd take up, but you can get pretty powerful mini PCs these days (look for ones with an i3-N305 processor) or buy cheap second-hand ex-office PCs on eBay.
  For people that still don't want to have a physical server at their house, you can do a lot of the same self-hosting stuff using a VPS. If you live in an area with expensive electricity (like California or Australia), you can usually get a VPS with a modern processor, ~8GB RAM, and a decent amount of NVMe disk space for $5/month or less, which is easily what it'd cost you just for the electricity usage of a home server.
  
  Can you recommend a good VPS service? I've been meaning to get a Synology, but it's out of my budget for now.
  
  I like GreenCloudVPS, and they've got a "budget" line that's very reasonably priced: https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale. They're currently running a promotion where if you pay for three years in advance, you get double the RAM. I think they're sold out of their cheapest one ($15/year) at the moment though.
  RackNerd is good too. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/182479/official-b-l-a-c-k-f-r-i-d-a-y-thread-community-endorsed-take-a-peek-racknerds-black-friday/
  A lot of hosts had good Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales recently so it's probably worth browsing LowEndTalk and seeing if any deals are still active.
- How do you access it away from home. I'm able to access my NAS since Synology gives us a domain to use and we do everything using port forwarding. I would assume that if you set everything up by yourself, you would need to get your own domain and ssl certificates and everything?
  
  I setup my own VPN using this on a raspberry pi. Using the ikev2. I like DietPi for the OS.
  https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn/tree/master
  
  I have a domain name on cloudflare DNS, Let's Encrypt certificates that auto renew and an Nginx reverse proxy pointing at the services I host. Port forwarding through the opnsense router for https.
  It's been a journey setting it up, but its basically been unchanged for about 5 years now and works well. If I need to I can VPN in too.

470 comments