Came back from lunch to keep working and found my server unreachable. Wi-Fi gone, Ethernet gone too. Not sure if my ISP actually blocked the connection or if it was just a normal home network hiccup, but it lasted several minutes and only came back after I rebooted the server myself. Total downtime: 4 minutes. Not a big deal on its own, but it was the third time something like this happened, and it made the decision for me: time to get off my home network for good.
So today I moved to a VPS with Hetzner.
A few honest notes for anyone thinking about doing the same:
It’s overkill for what I need right now. But at the rate things are growing, I’d rather move early than migrate under pressure later.
It took the entire day. Even in the simplest possible case (just copying everything from old server to new), you still have to spin up the new server, set up the firewall, migrate data, swap DNS/proxy settings, and manually test every integration (webhooks included). None of that is hard, but none of it is fast either. Budget a full day, not an afternoon.
The cutover itself caused a second outage. Swapping the Cloudflare reverse proxy over should’ve been instant. Something broke, I had to retry, and it cost about 5 minutes of downtime. Lucky for me, no active users at that moment.
Do the cutover early in the day, not at night. If something goes wrong (and something will), you want hours of daylight and attention left to fix it, not a broken deploy at midnight with users waking up to a dead app.
Once you move, going back isn’t really an option. Self-hosting has real benefits (cost, control) and real risks (your ISP is now a single point of failure for your business). A VPS flips that trade. Just know the switch is a one-way door if you don’t want to do all that work again to reverse it.
Net result: worth it, but plan for the real cost, not the “it’s just a copy” cost.
Source: r/Hosting · by /u/KarlHildebrand