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Old laptop as a server is viable and not unheard of. They're generally low power consumption, and have a built-in KVM and UPS.
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Depends on your VPN provider and use case. I'd recommend against Tor-only if you want normal people to ever see anything you blog. You'll need static IP and/or dynamic DNS if you want it to be reachable with any kind of reliability. Doing it over VPN requires your provider to support port forwarding, which not all do.
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Again, depends on your use case. It's generally a good idea to disable unused services. Worst case it goes down while you're on holidays or something and you can't get it back up for a while. Can you live with that? It might also be a good idea to leave SSH on but access restricted to LAN only. That way you don't have to get up from your main rig to tweak stuff on it, and can follow tutorials in a browser while SSH'ed in to the server.
Self-hosting
Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
Also check out:
That doesn't seem to be too old of a laptop at all. One thing I'd say is to use an SSD as the main partition you run your apps on, as HDDs might be quite slow.
If you wanna keep the VPS, you can use it as a public inbound gateway + outbound proxy for your homeserver, so traffic looks like it comes in and out of your VPS. I wrote some notes on setting up Tailscale in such a manner, but there's plenty of other options.
If you don't wanna keep the VPS, you can front your inbound traffic with Cloudflare Tunnels, and use a commercial VPN to act as a proxy for outbounds. If you don't have any apps that make frequent network requests (e.g. a Matrix server), then a VPN may not be necessary
You should leave SSH on, especially if if you wanna run it without a monitor, but use key auth and limit it to your LAN only
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Yes, lots of people do this. Good idea to remove the battery if possible, or you'll have a spicy balloon eventually.
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VPN (or cloudflare tunnel) is not a bad idea, but its not essential either, my server is publically exposed, and it largely isnt a problem. I only expose port 443 and some specific random high ports though. I wouldnt expose 22 to the internet.
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Keep SSH, just dont expose to the internet, its always nice to have multiple ways into a box, incase one is hung or something.
If you can find a way to limit the battery to 60%, then you have a safe and cheap UPS.
Even better idea. Although if your power goes out, usually your internet goes as well, which somewhat diminishes the UPS value.
I put my cable modem and Wi-Fi router on their own UPS. If the power goes down, I still have internet for half a day.
That makes sense, although if its a severe power outage the other end might go out if they dont have a working UPS.
I've got a home battery, so its kinda like a bad UPS. Will run all day, but the switchover isnt seamless, so it hard-shuts down. Never lost any data though, so happy to keep risking it.
It gives you enough time to shut down properly and avoid data loss, which is what a UPS is supposed to do.
If you configure your power settings right, it'll run on battery then shutdown or s2d safely.
Depending on the electricity price where you live, a VPS with 8GB RAM might be cheaper than running the laptop. Just something to keep in mind. GreenCloudVPS have some for $45 annually: https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale (I'm not affiliated with them)
Should I run the server over a VPN
Do you mean for you to access it remotely, or do you mean to expose it publicly via the VPN (so that you can have publicly-exposed services while hiding your home IP)?
For remote access, I'd recommend Tailscale. It mostly "just works".
If your laptop draws an average of 25 watts and you're paying 25 cents usd per kilowatt hour for electricity, then you're looking at $54.75 a year to run your laptop.
Most places in America you're only paying closer to like 13 cents a kilowatt hour and very few laptops would be running a continuous 25 watts with your typical server setup, although, undoubtedly it would spike to 65 watts or so from time to time.
Although with tweaking you might get long periods on idle and idle power draw could be way below 10 watts and average of <20 watts is not unheard of. Depends on what C-states your hardware supports and you should find out that with powertop and other tools.
Where I live in California, electricity can be over US$0.60/kWh during peak summer time. Thankfully I have solar panels that offset most of the cost. I'm from Australia which also has high electricity prices.
I meant expose it publicly via the VPN.
You'll need to use a VPN that supports port forwarding. You could use a cheap VPS instead.