I hear that! Admittedly, I've gotten grumpy at myself a few times for "not being able to make something practical," but I'm reminded when my wife thanks me occasionally for our home server setup (she loves Nextcloud), that it is practical and we use it all the time.

I've got my Wireguard I'm hosting on OCI (they give you 2 free VM instances), and looking to use the second instance to host SearXNG, then have Azure AD for free Active Directory, Home Assistant & Mycroft on Pi's, and otherwise, hosting local VM's via Proxmox on some older servers. I haven't gone too hard into clustering or orchestration yet, though I'm looking to replace most of those VM's with Docker instances at some point here, reduce compute reservations. Most of my power reduction has been through logical means, not yet through hardware, the costs involved keep me from leaping too hard quite yet. (Hard to drop big money on servers when rent is over half of my income) But I'll get there! I love seeing how much I can do with very little, so it at least scratches that part of the brain in the meantime :)