Person: "Why do you run your own server? why not rent a VPS instead of investing 1500 euros in your own server?"
Me: "Do you know how asspensive a VPS with 3TB of storage, 32GB of RAM and 16threads is? You gonna pay that for me?"

Agreed, went from a $40 dollar mc server to less than 5

@alexbrooklyn I'd pay easily 200 euros a month for the VPS I'd need to replace this thing... Given that I pay about 10 euros a month worth of power, that means I only need to run for about 8 months without anything breaking to break even.

I already broke even (sitting at 9 months now)...

Yeah, for personal use a small VPS can make a lot of sense, but anything more than that quickly starts to get ridiculous in costs. Worth it for industry because of the maintenance savings & uptime guarantees of course, but not on a personal level.

I have close to 20TB storage on mine, and the monthly cost in the cloud would be astronomical.

If you know how to set up and you won't need to scale a lot, go for it.