2023 in review: the year I stopped renting convenience

The theme of 2023 was ownership. Mail, git hosting, a static CDN for my sites and a proper backup pipeline all moved onto hardware I control. Not everything survived the year.

Kept

The mail server (see October's post), the NAS with ZFS snapshots, and automated backups verified by quarterly restore drills. The drills are the part people skip and the part that matters.

Dropped

Two experiments did not make it: a home k8s cluster (I run Docker Compose and I am at peace) and self-hosted search. The maintenance-to-value ratio was terrible for both.

Numbers

Downtime across all services: under three hours for the year, most of it a planned migration. Electricity for the always-on hardware: less than one month of a comparable cloud bill. The spreadsheet says the trade is fine; the restore drills say the backups are fine.