I was surprised by this, but you can install a driver and simply print to these printers. Or, at least, the one I purchased is that way.
You can also use lp, lpr, or nc to send text and codes to it.
Mine is connected to my network via Ethernet. No RPi is required to send stuff to it from any computer on the network.
I imagine the software presented here does a lot more than proxy requests to a printer though. What sorts of payloads were you sending off to be printed? If it worked Good Enough for lightly formatted text, no-hosted is way better than self-hosted!