I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

Though I wonder if even besides adding an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) (writing acronym out for anyone else who would’ve had to Google it), this might be a useful exercise recovering from outages in general. This is coming from someone who hasn’t actually done any self hosting of my own, but you saying you’re still finding down services reminds me of when I learned the benefit of testing system backups as part of making them.

I was lucky in that I didn’t have any data loss, but restoring from my backup took a lot more manual work than I’d anticipated, and it came at an awkward time. Since then, my restoring from backup process is way more streamlined.