Self-hosting is fun and easy to start using no more than a Raspberry Pi or old desktop PC. To get anything serious done though, you’ll need a VPS with ample bandwidth, one of more fixed IP addresses and some scalability.
There’s lots of cheap offers on lowendbox, some of them excellent value for money (I host many of my Presearch nodes on RackNerd) but for my main server I needed to find something that could do it all and still be affordable. Somewhere on my side of the planet, in my timezone and giving me full control over the whole chain from firewall to chosen distro.
I found all this at TiZu. Run by a good friend, their attention to detail, both in security and quality of hardware, has kept downtime to an absolute minimum. Not that nielsemmer.com ever gets any traffic, but it also runs my Graylog/ElasticSearch cluster and 40two.tube, both of which do.
Countless DDOS attacks, script-kiddies (with proxies) across the globe, my services weather the Fediverse currents with ease.
He’s now started documenting his best practices for the rest of us at tizutech.com. One for your bookmarks, if you’re into self-hosting.