>I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998

My excuse is that I never had the financial stability that I have now in my middle 30s to get things going, also moving oversea and what not didn't help either.

But I didn't go crazy, I have 3 Proxmox servers running a few services, Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS to avoid DNS poisoning and personal data tracking.

A DIY TrueNAS as the primary system to have a copy of my data.

I have a 4K bluray with physical media, but I do have Jellyfin also because nothing matches 80s, 90s, early 2000s movies and buying DVD in 2026 is pointless. Also, it is not easy or very, very expensive to find a bluray copy of old movies in 2026. Jellyfin solves that.

All my servers are consuming 110W 200VA tops, connected to a second hand APC UPS 1000VA.

If the whole world goes to shit right now, I can still run all my stuff without dependency to the internet.

My last goal is to have a solar/battery system so if WW3 really happens sending us to the cave age, wherever I am will still be 21st century.

1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis.

It was goddam glorious.

Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.

It was even more goddam glorious.

Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.

I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)

"since 1998"

We're old.

A lot of HNers weren't born yet.