For some reason I get wildly excited about being able to take and deploy something on a remote computer, and even add some automation to this process. It's like that hobby that God forbid becomes work, but in small doses it's incredibly pleasant.
There's no soul in all these cloud-hosted solutions, and they don't belong to you, the inner paranoid is dissatisfied. But with self-hosted you deploy, set up backups, and it's pleasant every time.
That's approximately why my two-page website, for example, lives on a VM that monitors whether updates have appeared in the Registry and deploys it from an image automatically. And the image itself is built on every push in GitHub Actions. Not needed at all, of course, but. First, it's beautiful. Second, how else would I get experience with all these buzzwords in the backend world. Third, on this foundation it's cool to deploy various other services.
An idea appeared - quickly spun up a clean little VM in the clouds, docker container here - docker container there, it ran, drew conclusions, deleted the VM, spent ten cents. Beautiful.
Yesterday as part of another experiment I deployed Postgres, wrote a program that just sends random numbers to it with time binding, deployed Grafana which pulls data from Postgres and stared for half an hour at a graph that updated and moved by itself.
This was preceded by several hours of suffering, performing random actions and changing random lines in configs, of course, can't avoid that, but I like the result.