Depends what services you need. I used to be doing a lot with my server but then it became just static web hosting and nextcloud which I replaced with the cheapest google storage plan and gitlab pages.

These days power usage might be workable with something like a mac mini server. I did a test and my ryzen 5 server with 3 HDDs was drawing 75w minimum and my area has quite expensive power so it just didn't make sense to keep running it.

A VPS also comes with a lot of really useful advantages. You aren't tied down to the hardware. As your needs change, you can change the scale of the VPS. Right now I still have the homeserver sitting here waiting to be sold as well as some other previous machines which were not powerful enough.

A VPS is also relatively unaffected by things like power and internet outages. It just keeps working. It's more convenient when you move house since you don't have downtime in the process. It has a dedicated fixed IP address and ipv6 with no fucking around with CGNAT or blocked ports.

Just buying a fixed IP address would cost an extra $5/month.

Once you consider every cost, a VPS can seem pretty good value in many cases.

> A box with an i5-4570 or similar and 8GB of RAM costs about $80 to buy, and uses ~25W or around $25-30 a year in power.

I'm guessing you're looking at the preowned market?

For those prices, people might consider themselves lucky to get an underpowered Celeron with BYO RAM and storage, brand new.

Yep! Not much point in buying new hardware for running basic services at home, especially since used business stuff is so cheap, it can cost 1/10th the amount for similar results of buying new.

I'm currently using a mac mini 2011 that I got from free from work (it did not support newer xcode and mojave). I'm the only user and have Lychee, Jellyfin, Syncthing on it.