This sounds interesting, might have to look into it. Running a physical home server would be awesome, but it currently sounds above my skill level as far as hardware and networking :)

I run a cheap EC2 instance, and plug it into an S3 bucket for file storage, and my RDS MySQL database.

How do you deal with the high costs of running an RDS instance? I think almost $30 p/m is a bit high for a small single family NC instance, when the EC2 instance running the actual service is going to a fraction of that.

That's a good question. Yeah, maybe not the best setup for everyone. You are right, the cost of a t3.small on-demand is close to $30/month, just for your NC instance alone that's not worth it.

In my case, for purposes of hobby projects and various self hosted services, I keep both MySQL & Postgres RDS instances running in perpetuity, both t3a.micro. On demand pricing is roughly $13/month, but since I plan on keeping them running 'forever' I purchase reserved instances. For a 3 year plan, 'no-upfront', this brings the cost down to about $8.75/month. Much more palatable if you ask me :)

Also, I use them for multiple projects, so the convenience factor is worth it for me. For your NC alone, I imagine it would be good enough to just run you DB server on the same EC2 instance. I doubt the database storage would eat up much disk space.

You could however, rip through a ton of disk space from file storage, so I feel like S3 buckets are a must, and cheap anyway.

My physical home server is a nuc. Could also be a Raspberry Pi 4, little hardware skill required :)