I self host.

I use nginx as a reverse proxy with crowdsec. The backends are nginx and mariadb. Everything is running on Debian VMs or LXCs with apparmor profiles and it's all isolated to an "untrusted" VLAN.

It's obviously still "safer" to have someone else host your stuff, like a VPS or Github Pages, etc, but I enjoy selfhosting and I feel like I've mitigated most of the risk.

I'd imagine that if your job is making YouTube videos, portainer and other graphical abstraction layers probably make more visually interesting videos than just watching someone type out a bunch of commands.

Convenience. Unless you live right near the border, it's probably faster/easier to shop in your own state than drive all the way to another.

But if you do live near the border of a state without a sales tax, then it's pretty common to shop in the neighboring state, especially for larger purchases.

The US doesn't have a national sales tax, so it depends whether the individual state imposes a tax or not.

I've also been running nginx in an unprivileged LXC container. I haven't used fail2ban, specifically, but crowdsec has been working without issue.

You can mostly just treat an LXC like a normal VM.

I mostly learn from mistakes, and since homelabs are all about learning, there are bound to be mistakes.

I've borked my network multiple times, broken VMs, and redesigned things from the ground up, again.

Big lesson is to have backups. Lol

On a pi, specifically?

Mine is currently running Mailrise and serving as a qdevice for Proxmox. It used to run nginx as a reverse proxy, but I moved that to a different machine. I had a second pi specifically for sharing USB devices over the network, but I wasn't using it very much so it's currently not in use.

If you're looking for general ideas, I think a pi would make a good appliance for ddclient, Homepage/Dashy, an SSH/VPN jumpbox, UPS monitoring, or a notification platform. Basically, any set-and-forgot service that you want to keep running 24/7.

I'm using cloudflare as my nameserver and the free API seems to work just fine with ddclient.

Steam controller or PlayStation, depending on the game.

Someone probably just dropped a reel while swapping the tape on their mainframe and has spent the last week trying to roll it all back up.

It never stopped working for me, besides the outage the other day. I'm guessing it's because I'm a mod for a sub. They said from the beginning that they wouldn't break things for mods, and surprisingly, it seems that they've kept their word on that.

Just bought Palworld, but haven't had a chance to play yet.