I personally bought my hardware, asus router and dedicated mini-pc for networking and server tinkering, besides electrical I only have to pay for my domain which I got from namecheap but then eventually transferred to Cloudflare, but thinking I should switch registrars after my next bill payment.

When I really got into self hosting, I was just going to get my domain name and host everything myself. The capitalist pigs at hosthero decided to get rid of the wild card option for email so I had idiotically got the unlimited email package, when I left I had close to 300 different email addresses. You know free trials don’t last forever, unless you make them last until you get board of whatever or find a FOSS alternative! I thought well setting up my own email server cannot be that hard, I was sadly mistaken and this girl likes her hair and would have pulled it all out trying to get the email working. I self host my blog, so there is that, I have wireguard running on my Flint 2 with vanilla’ish (I have made changes to it) install of OpenWRT. When I was all set to run my own email server I got two static IPs, now one of them is just sitting there with the MX records for my testing domain name.

I have two domains one that I actually use, and one that I have for testing new things, like maybe I will come across a caddy alternative that I will want to try.

Edit: I was thinking we were talking in c/selfhost I have a thing against Cloudflare so I would never use them. Something happened to me when I was using their DNS when I was much younger do not remember what it was but I just do not like them. EasyDNS offers just the domain, you do not need to get anything special. I had moved my personal domain to a .ca when the boycott the US stuff started. Hosthero seemed like a good deal for me at the time, I was only dipping my toes into selfhosting (pihole) now that I am about knee deep in the hobby of self hosting I have a lot more than a single pi running pihole. I am personally using ghost to publish things onto my personal blog and than that host has a script to post it to mastodon, I want to try and get the excitement of the book of faces back but it is just not there yet.