[gerhardlazu]

My first Supermicro just turned 9 and it's still running strong, with a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 & k3s over the holidays. The second Supermicro turned 5, and has been running FreeBSD all this time like a champ. They are both loft guardians.

A bunch of bare metal hosts run on Scaleway / Online, and different VMs & managed services run in Digital Ocean, Linode, AWS & GCP. I sometimes spin the odd bare metal instance on Equinix Metal (former Packet).

A diverse fleet means that there's always something new to learn and try out. A single large host would make me anxious, as no internet provider or power grid is 100% reliable and available. Also, software upgrades sometimes fail, and things get messed up all the time, which is when I find it most efficient to just start from scratch. A single host makes that less convenient.

Every approach has its pros and cons, which is why my main workstation is a 20 Xeon W with 64GB RAM & 1TB NVME : ). Yes, there is a backup workstation which doubles up as a mobile one meaning that it can work without power or hard internet for almost a day. Options are good ; )