Personally, I think yes, it is worth it, However your friends bookkeeper might shit a brick. Building up IT infrastructure from the ground up is not cheap. Although storage cost is coming down.

Seriously, running with Google and company will be cheaper in the short term. What you can potentially gain doing it yourself however is resilience from catastrophic 3rd party events. If your not dependent on a third party for your IT infra, it doesn’t matter what they do, or don’t do. For a recent example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/influxdata-apologizes-for-deleting-cloud-regions-without-performing-scream-test/ar-AA1dIPX2

Hmm, looks like France and Germany are each smaller than Texas. Didn’t realize that.

That’s what I started on! Honestly, RAM is likely to be your biggest bottle neck. Pretty much anything will be doable though, with enough swap and a fast drive. Just don’t expect great performance.

When I’m home it is usually my wife that notices first. That said, when I’m away from home I almost immediately notice any issues. My self hosted services are the backend for almost everything I use. Just need to find a decent replacement for GoodNotes on iOS.

Personally, I use Gitea. My needs are simple though and I probably don’t use 99% of what it can do.

I largely stopped using Reddit,so…… Can’t say I care.

Sustainably? They don’t (mostly). Most are either pet projects, paid for out of pocket by the instance owner or run off donations. Neither are particularly sustainable long term, with rare exceptions like sdf.org.

The SDF runs just about every federated service you can think of, and has done so since the 1980s, run almost entirely off donations. Started as a dialup BBS (still active).