curbstickle

Only windows devices (laptop I use for work stuff). The other laptops are Linux (NFS) or Chromebooks (for the kids, no access).

Devices don’t really leave often (aside from mine), so not much of an issue. If the NAS is offline, not much else would be going on either.

I’m at the same age - just to mention, samba is nowhere near the horror show it used to be. That said, I use NFS for my Debian boxes and mac mini build box to hit my NAS, samba for the windows laptop.

Absolutely sums up the USA currently.

whatever the fuck kiwi farm is.

Nazis.

Its perfectly viable to run your support software on your own hardware (whether local or VPS).

I do this for myself, as well as for companies sized from 50-5000 (roughly). Larger ones deploy off my specs. The question to me is what is the plan around it. How will backups be handled? What if it goes offline due to a hardware failure? Do you have backups in place? A cold or hot spare? Multiple machines in an HA configuration? Do you need to go to that level if there is an outage?

I also prefer to make use of solutions with a support model that allows for locally hosted, but has a phone number that can be called. Part of this is because I don’t want to field all these calls, part of it is for the comfort of the client that they have a number they can call (or a dedicated email, whatever, the point is a support contact not how they are contacted), and part of it is to support the project.

My wife has a (small) business, I have a small business, and I work for a consulting firm (design and engineering). All three make use of on-prem f/loss, all three pay support fees to those projects who do that (and random annual contributions where possible to those that don’t).

So the short answer is: Figure out your requirements and your disaster recovery scenarios, then figure out what option works best for your needs from there. Cloud, VPS, or internally hosted are all viable, and all come with their own pluses and minuses.