From experience, older thinkpads usually sell for cheap, come with an inbuilt monitor, and are built sturdy. Highly recommend.

I see. On the surface, that seems to make sense. I might need to rethink how I configure my batteries.

First off, I think you’re completely right in that laptop batteries are definitely a non-ideal solution. And, I’m really not an expert in this, so take my words with a grain of salt.

You could mitigate a bit of the dangers by doing some of the following (I only did the first):

• Reducing the max charge level to 50% of the capacity.
• Monitor your batteries health to alert for any discrepancies.
• Switch out your batteries every couple of years (which is super easy without downtime on the aformentioned old thinkpads).

If you are an under $100 budget, there seems to be an argument that maybe you are willing to risk a little bit for that extra power reliability.

To give a different opinion than all the thin-clients, old laptops can be a good choice too. I am a bit preferrential to really nice old thinkpads.

If you buy them used you can get insane prices (~$40) and also you get all the laptop conveniences of a keyboard, screen, battery (for power failure). Also I think the power/performance ratio is pretty much the same to the thin clients.

Thanks for the correction, edited the post.

In the spirit of selfhosting, you can also host headscale. Its an open source implementation of the proprietary tailscale control plane.

It allows you to get over the 5 device limit (different depending on tiers), as well as keep your traffic on your devices. And, imo, it is pretty stable.

The only issue is that the control plane (by nature) has to be publically accessible. But imo it’s way less of a security target than a massive app like nextcloud.

Edit: device limits were wrong

I really like hugo. Everything is written in Markdown and its pretty light. Definitely not as heavy as a full CMS. I also think the themes are pretty nice.

To deploy it you can use github pages or some cloud services (the hugo site lists some).

Its also pretty flexible, so its pretty easy to change how you want to deploy it, or change the look.