The "just use a VPS" advice is actually correct about 80% of the time, which is what makes it so frustrating for the self-hosting crowd.
Hetzner's auction servers run about 30-40 EUR/month for hardware that would cost you $800+ to buy and $15-20/month in electricity alone to run at home. You're not beating that on cost unless you already own the hardware and have cheap power.
Where the VPS bro falls apart is sovereignty. OVH's Strasbourg fire in 2021 vaporized 3.6 million websites in one night because people treated "it's in a data center" as a backup strategy. Hetzner has locked accounts over DMCA disputes with zero appeal process.
For Bitcoin stuff specifically, the calculus flips. Running your node on a VPS means your ISP and the hosting provider see your transaction patterns. The whole point of sovereignty is that your financial activity doesn't route through a third party who can be subpoenaed or pressured. A $200 mini PC under your desk with a Tor connection is worth more than a $500/month bare metal server for that use case.
The "just use a VPS" crowd glosses over something that matters a lot. In 2021, DigitalOcean complied with 1,847 law enforcement requests and terminated accounts on 23 separate government orders without notifying the account holders first. Hetzner's ToS explicitly prohibits cryptocurrency mining and has nuked nodes that looked like they were running consensus software.
The actual sovereignty spectrum runs: VPS (landlord can evict you) > colocated hardware (landlord holds the keys but you own the box) > home server (you hold everything but your ISP can throttle) > mesh network (nobody can stop you but latency is rough).
For a Lightning or Bitcoin node specifically, the kill shot is that your VPS provider can image your disk while the node is running. Hot wallet keys sitting in memory get captured in a snapshot. Running a node on hardware someone else physically controls is roughly equivalent to storing your seed phrase in a shared Google Doc.
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The "just use a VPS" advice is actually correct about 80% of the time, which is what makes it so frustrating for the self-hosting crowd.
Hetzner's auction servers run about 30-40 EUR/month for hardware that would cost you $800+ to buy and $15-20/month in electricity alone to run at home. You're not beating that on cost unless you already own the hardware and have cheap power.
Where the VPS bro falls apart is sovereignty. OVH's Strasbourg fire in 2021 vaporized 3.6 million websites in one night because people treated "it's in a data center" as a backup strategy. Hetzner has locked accounts over DMCA disputes with zero appeal process.
For Bitcoin stuff specifically, the calculus flips. Running your node on a VPS means your ISP and the hosting provider see your transaction patterns. The whole point of sovereignty is that your financial activity doesn't route through a third party who can be subpoenaed or pressured. A $200 mini PC under your desk with a Tor connection is worth more than a $500/month bare metal server for that use case.
The "just use a VPS" crowd glosses over something that matters a lot. In 2021, DigitalOcean complied with 1,847 law enforcement requests and terminated accounts on 23 separate government orders without notifying the account holders first. Hetzner's ToS explicitly prohibits cryptocurrency mining and has nuked nodes that looked like they were running consensus software.
The actual sovereignty spectrum runs: VPS (landlord can evict you) > colocated hardware (landlord holds the keys but you own the box) > home server (you hold everything but your ISP can throttle) > mesh network (nobody can stop you but latency is rough).
For a Lightning or Bitcoin node specifically, the kill shot is that your VPS provider can image your disk while the node is running. Hot wallet keys sitting in memory get captured in a snapshot. Running a node on hardware someone else physically controls is roughly equivalent to storing your seed phrase in a shared Google Doc.