I do get a billing error about every 2 or 3 years. Usually something like they double bill a month, or the price for just 1 month is suddenly 2x - 3x the normal price.

I’ve used them for probably 2 decades, getter in because of the $1/month for a year deal.

I think I’m on the top, or 2nd from the top, tier. Has unlimited disk space, but it’s not open access from the start. Every so many tens of GB you have to call to get the soft limit raised. They are trying to keep a bot from just filling the space up.

I use their hosted WordPress, so that they handle the upgrading.

I also have run a few wiki sites on there. Those install and run fine.

I wish I could figure out if I could install OwnCloud or such on there. I’m not great with Linux. You don’t have rights to the OS, but anything you access through a webpage or FTP you can put there. You should have access to chron jobs, but my skills aren’t there yet.

I mainly use them to host my own email domain, that I then access from gMail.

Biggest problem I’ve had with them is they will charge extra if you use a phased-out version of Python. So you have to make sure you keep anything using Python updated.

That’s a neat idea of using an extra phone as a file server. I’ve only thought of phones as consumers, not providers.

I vote for CasaOS based on the videos I’ve seen of it. I haven’t actually done any self hosting stuff myself, yet.

Laptops are cool servers because it has a builtin battery that usually lasts at least an hour, especially if the screen is off. You don’t have to worry about UPS batteries that give less than 10 minutes and have a horrible beeping sound.

From the drives I have seen, usually there are 3 write-cache sizes.

Usually the smallest write-cache is for drives 128GB or smaller. Sometimes the 256GB is also here.

Usually the middle size write-cache is for 512GB and sometimes 256GB drives.

Usually the largest write-cache is only in 1TB and bigger drives.

Performance-wise for writes, you want the biggest write cache, so you want at least a 1TB drive.

For the best wear leveling, you want the drive as big as you can afford, while also looking at the makeup of the memory chips. In order of longest lasting listed first: Single Level, Multi Level, Triple Level, Quad Level.

An analogy is writing everything on one piece of paper with a pencil. When you need to change or remove something, you cross it out, instead of erasing, and write the new data to a clean part of the paper. When there are no more clean areas, you use the eraser to erase a crossed off section.

The larger the paper, the less frequent you come back to the same area again with the eraser.

Using an eraser on paper slowly degrades the paper until that section tears and never gets used again.

In general and simplifying, my understanding is:

There is the area where data is written, and there is the File Allocation Table that keeps track of where files are placed.

When part of a file needs to be overwritten (either because it inserted or there is new data) the data is really written to a new area and the old data is left as is. The File Allocation Table is updated to point to the new area.

Eventually, as the disk gets used, that new area eventually comes back to a space that was previously written to, but is not being used. And that data gets physically overwritten.

Each time a spot is physically overwritten, it very very slightly degrades.

With a larger disk, it takes longer to come back to a spot that has already been written to.

Oversimplifying, previously written data that is no longer part of a file is effectively lost, in the way that shredding a paper effectively loses whatever is written, and in a more secure way than as happens in a spinning disk.

With spinning disks, I preferred Seagate over Western Digital. And then move to HGST.

Back in those days, Western Digital had the best warranty. And I used it on every Western Digital. But that was still several days without a drive, and I still needed a backup drive.

So it was better to buy two drives at 1.3 x the price of one Western Digital. And then I realized that none of the Seagate or HGST drives failed on me.

For SATA SSDs, I just get a 1TB to maximize the cache and wear leveling, and pick a brand where the name can be pronounced.

For NVME, for a work performance drive, I pick a 2TB drive with the best write cache and sustainable write speed at second tier pricing.

For a general NVME drive, I pick at least a 1 TB from anyone who has been around long enough to have reviews written about them.

Some of the best and worst decisions people have made started with, “I was bored.” Ha!