It shouldn't be the first thing said. And it shouldn't be the only thing said in a comment.
I agree with OP. I haven't posted my setups over the years because I didn't want the armchair quarterbacks to appear and rain on my parade.
Edit: my bad you said agree not to be rude like ops examples in your first sentence. I still disagree with the second part of your comment though. It's not needed if not asked for.
Not as many years ago as I would prefer given my professional experience, I was running a lot from home. Most of it for myself to learn more (so nothing my home itself was dependent on) but a percentage of it was for storage of pictures, home videos, digitalized documents, emails, etc.
I ran my own exchange server for years (utilizing my own TLD that I bought in 2008).
I was in the process of migrating data from a couple of older hosts to the newer ones I had setup in the garage; basically from two cobbled together Dell T series poweredge servers in my hall closet to a small stack of R series poweredge in a 42u cabinet rack in the garage.
My whole stack was setup across the two hosts including backups from veeam from one to the other and copies.ofnthe backups stored on an external. Due to the size of the backups and where I was on my life financially, anything hosted up in cloud space was just a little out of my budget. Anything I could afford was suspicious at the time.
This too long story ends basically by me not paying attention to what I was doing and ended up destroying the raid on both of the original hosts without having finished moving all my data.
I lost years of emails from my exchange server, all the pictures and home made videos of my daughters life from birth to that point in time, and my backup data.
All from my own mistake(s).
I did everything I was "supposed" to do to keep stuff protected until I messed it up.
My daughter passed away this year in February at 16 years old. I'd give anything to have those pictures and videos back.
My point is, you can plan and execute and throw money at it if you're able. And you'll likely be fortunate enough to never really lose anything that's valuable to you. But even planning and implementing, you can still lose stuff just by oversight and human error.
That's the game, man. 🤷
I ran a stack of 630's we decom'ed from work (5 of them) in 2020. When we moved in 2021 I didn't want to setup the full rack in the garage again. I sold them all to a local place (server monkey) for 2k a pop.
10k.
If you get bored with them, look into resale options. Give yourself a little bonus. These gen are harder to find right now. You're in a unique position to buff up your savings if you feel so inclined.
Good score!
Namecheap offers free domain security masking for life when registered through them.
It becomes a total non-issue.
Rust
Edit:
Check out AMP by cubecoders for an easy to deploy all-in-one game server hosting web interface.
I love it. It supports many of the games mentioned in the thread already.
I used to sport pfsense decals on my back truck window for years. Like you, had deployed them commercially for years before that, and proudly.
After all the bs, I'd look at those stickers with combo of nostalgia and remorse.
Had a local lawn company out to do our yard last summer and they managed to wing something into that back window and shatter it, requiring me to replace it. (Lawn company paid).
Realized I was really happy with the new window cause the stickers were gone.
Fuck pfsense.