> I personally use an old laptop which is plenty fast
If connected on wifi to your router this of course solves the "kick a cable out" problem too, even if the battery is really old you'll almost certainly still have a few minutes.
> Then install unattended-upgrades, put admin panels (phpmyadmin, wp-admin) behind basic authentication
I'd go as far as protecting the directory to only allow access from local network, and use wireguard to reach the machine.
It's likely a server in the corner of the room will cost more than a VPS, certainly in my country. A server drawing 25 Watts cost more than the $3/month I pay. (That said I also have a pihole running on a 1B - my parasitic house load is about 100W for the fridge, router, wifi, etc)
> even if the battery is really old you'll almost certainly still have a few minutes
Very true! Battery from like 2015 still manages to keep it running for about two hours I think, which is frankly amazing. I was constantly dealing with taking the battery out of the laptop when not in use (98% of the time, it was connected to a charger, either in a classroom or at home, so I'd need only to bridge the stand-by/suspend/sleep period in the train). At the time, it didn't seem to have an effect as the battery still decreased in capacity and I was disappointed with the results, but I gotta say, it is certainly doing a good job since then!
Unfortunately, external drives on the 'server' are not on uninterruptible power and having two of them in a btrfs mirror caused me more headaches than I like to admit. Even after I figured out which one had the more recent data after going out of sync, I misunderstood the phrasing of the man page and mixed up the arguments for the device to be recovered and the device to recover from. 2/7 would not recommend btrfs on devices without UPS, or if you don't want to shell out the money to buy three instead of two large drives so you can have a 1:1 disk image of the known good device before starting to operate on it (which is what btrfs was supposed to do in the first place, but alas).
> A server drawing 25 Watts costs more than the $3/month I pay.
With the screen and keyboard backlight and such turned off, it should draw less than 25W unless you're actively making use of it (and thus it being worth it), but yes that's ballpark correct.
I also get a lot more value out of it than what I expect to get for $3/month, though :). LAN speed transfers can be nice, no network latency (at least not beyond of your control) when you host a game server, access control is all up to you, dedicated hardware, you can choose to upgrade to 16GB RAM at will (perhaps you got a new DDR4 machine and have no use for the old DDR3 RAM that still fits in this 'server') without having to pay extra every month for those gigabytes forever, buying storage basically at cost price...
I thought I had made a mistake when I calculated the cost of 100W incandescent lighting to be the awfully coincidental number of almost exactly 100€/year. Finding this to be correct was quite the revelation: makes estimating the cost of anything in the house so easy because I already knew the wattages :)
(The landlord had installed these sensor-activated ancient bulbs in the hallway, where I pass through to to the cellar / power meter, and I was trying to track down this mysterious 100W that seemed to be always running, without fail. Turns out, it was only running when I was checking the meter! We then did the math with a better runtime estimate and still went out to buy LED bulbs at our earliest convenience. They're brighter than before (we erred on the high side), just as warm light, and use 2.5x less power.)
Correct, i.e. 40W instead of 100W. It sounded more impressive than "40% of the original value" so I went with "2.5x less". Not the best measure to choose one's words by, admittedly.
You managed to say that immediately. Were there other serious explanations that came to mind? If not then you need to have more self-confidence because you do know!
If connected on wifi to your router this of course solves the "kick a cable out" problem too, even if the battery is really old you'll almost certainly still have a few minutes.
> Then install unattended-upgrades, put admin panels (phpmyadmin, wp-admin) behind basic authentication
I'd go as far as protecting the directory to only allow access from local network, and use wireguard to reach the machine.
It's likely a server in the corner of the room will cost more than a VPS, certainly in my country. A server drawing 25 Watts cost more than the $3/month I pay. (That said I also have a pihole running on a 1B - my parasitic house load is about 100W for the fridge, router, wifi, etc)