1. Control and privacy. The server does exactly what I choose, not somebody’s business model.
2. Once you have other users, it’s not a hobby anymore. People are not amused by downtime.
3. The w3schools.com tutorials have been good for me.

12, but it’s complicated. I was a freelancer for a long time, count that as one job, but I had dozens of customers. I quit one place and went back, and 2 employers have been acquired while I worked there, count all those as one each. Not counting summer or part times while in school. This is all over the span of 44 years, so I’m a little quicker than your 4 years on average. The shortest one was a little less than a year; it was a mistake to take the job in the first place. IMO, switching jobs is the biggest, maybe the only, leverage a worker has vs an employer. If you don’t have a credible alternative to your job, they know that, and know they can victimize you.

Two things, one you care about and one you might not. The one you care about: you can set up a service in isolation. You can then test it, make sure it works, and switch over to it once you are sure, with almost no downtime. This is important for things you actually need to use. Once you do something like breaking your primary email server, you will understand. Also, less important, you can set up a service on, say, a VM at home, and move it to a VPS, without having to transfer the entire image, and it will work the same. The one you don’t care about. That last bit about moving servers around is important for cloud providers who turn these things on and off all the time.

name.com. I don’t remember why I picked them, but they do no BS and the service is fine.

Top day also, usually, except Active in channels where I don’t look that often.

Used to do that, until I started working from home. Half hour on a bike is perfect to get your head out of work. Often I still go for a ride after work (past my old job) even though I don’t need to.

I went back to my hometown last summer. I had not been there in decades. My sisters, who live nearby, both could not understand why. I ended up leaving ahead of plans, there was not much to do, and the place is economically defunct, none of my family or friends lives there anymore. I did reconnect with an old friend who lives nearby, which made the whole trip worthwhile. On the flip side, I now live in a pretty, affluent community. My son, 3 years out of college, comes home to visit, and in spite of being nostalgic, and wanting to visit his old haunts, says it’s not home anymore. We have done practically nothing to his old room, except he took a lot of the furniture with him. You are not the same you as when you were younger. The place isn’t the same either.

Likewise. I have been running it for years, almost no problem that I can think of. My setup is pretty vanilla, Apache, MySQL. It’s running in a container behind a reverse proxy. I keep it as up to date as possible. Only 3 people use mine, and I don’t use very many apps: files, notes, bookmarks, calendar, email.

Q-Tips. Paper shafts, plenty of fuzz on the ends.