On home hosting: you’re making my point for me.
“It’s easy” -> is there a step by step guide? There’s a blog post from 2018 and various tips scattered across forum threads.
“Just buy it on eBay” -> even more of my time that I’d have to figure out. I’m also not looking for a minimal box and I priced it out. There are ALWAYS cheaper options, with different trade offs.
The most recent post I found was about CloudflareD https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/8962/cloudflared-as-proxy-for-home-hosting
If Cloudron were serious about home hosting, building in first class support for Tailscale, Cloudflare, and similar providers would be the way to go.
I’d also love a built in config for one or more CDN providers (not just for home hosting!) which would take load off a server AND keep static sites up and running in the case of a server outage.
And of course, the email issue, where you need to add an SMTP relay, as a home IP isn’t going to have good mail delivery. Maybe with a VPN and a “gateway” box, but that’s a separate cost again.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m really intrigued with home hosting. I work on p2p and edge computing myself, and an IPFS server app is one of the custom apps I want to fund. But the majority of Cloudron apps are “classic web2 server apps”, which are mostly designed to run on servers.
A cloud hosted Cloudron to act as always on coordinator / relay / bootstrap connection to eg simple desktop apps (and/or connecting via Tailscale to the Cloudron box) is probably a nice trade off to serve many more people.