I use a VPS as a homelab gateway of sorts from the outside.

Essentially, the VPS runs a Wireguard server that I connect to on my OPNSense Router. The VPS then reverse-proxies all incoming traffic through the tunnel to my homelab. All my DNS entries point to the VPS's IP. This pretty much gives me a static IP, hides my real IP, and lets me do some light caching on the VPS. Kind of like a DIY cloudflare.

I also run Uptime Kuma on the VPS, since it will continue to work if my local network is down.

With Cloudflare Zero Trust there is absolutely no reason for me to host on a VPS anymore. I have old hardware that's all been revived and bootstrapped with cloudflare. If you have good Internet and decent upload IO why not start there especially if it's just for yourself.

Services that need a lot of storage, I host at home (Gonic, Jellyfin, Audiobook Shelf etc). Services where I care about availability when I'm away from home, I host on a VPS (Vaultwarden, Synapse, Wordpress, DokuWiki etc).

Public things I don't want on my home IP address, so non personal services.

I have my monitoring software running on my VPS so that if my server goes down for whatever reason I can still look at what might've caused it to go down. I also have Authentik running on it because I need my authentication system running to be able to login to said monitoring software. Lastly I have Mastodon on my VPS because the internet at my parents house doesn't have the upload bandwidth for it.

I have all of this running on Oracle Cloud Free Tier. I don't trust oracle in the slightest but I'm a broke college student so I take what I can get.

Any web service. I have lemmy and email on rented servers.

Because my university's network is cringe, I'm unfortunately forced to run everything on a VPS.

This comes with a financial cost, and I have to carefully ration my computing power, but it does have some upsides - enough that I honestly prefer it now.

• It keeps my desktop sealed away from the wilds of the open Internet. Obviously the risk isn't that great, but since every service you run represents a potential security hole... it's nice to have a "disposable" solution like a VPS.
• I don't have to worry about getting a static IP or using a service like Tailscale in order to talk to my services when away. All I have to do is point my Cloudflare DNS records at my VPS.
• Better uptime. I used to host my blog on my desktop (!) which meant it would go down whenever I rebooted/lost connection/whatever. My VPS restarts once a month to apply updates and is always-on otherwise.

I would say this: If it's just you accessing your server and nobody else, self-hosting is fine.

When it comes to giving other people access to your server, no matter how close of friends you may be, I would recommend renting a cheap VPS online. The security benefits are just that much better.

Right or wrong, the line I draw is "will I need to use this if I'm away from my home network?" If the answer's "yes," then I go with a VPS. I'm sure lots of people are angrily pounding their keyboard telling me to use Tailscale, but I have no interest in hacking/tweaking my home network's infrastructure.