These universal statements are almost never true. What means “most”? All 3 that I have are more, some up to 25W. If they are “new”, maybe. Not many that you can get on eBay are old enough that they will draw a noticeable amount. Add always, “it depends”.

Lemmy has relatively good search, usually if you remember bits of the title that works?

In any case: Both n100/n150 and raspi are in the <10W range. Obviously raspi is lower, but also A LOT slower and much worse connectivity. As the price is roughly comparable, I’d go for the much more capable N100/N150. Only go the full ‘minipc’ route if you don’t mind the (probably) higher power usage, which can depend highly on model. Older (but cheap on eBay) models can be 25W on idle.

Depending on what you actually need, I’d setup a Sync thing or NextCloud or something and go from there.

A VPS is like 5 bucks. Which isn’t nothing but when used as a redundancy or place to send (reasonably sized) backups, it’s cheaper than most alternatives. It’s also still a form of “self hosting”, at least for me.

Exporting, maybe on a schedule, to a keepass to keep somewhere, also works of course. But when hosting the only/main instance at home you’ll have at least one single point of failure, most likely many. Internet connection, server, network/switches, …

For me personally an ad is when I’m being sold something. I can’t be sold something that is free and open. So someone showcasing their paid (but self hosted) service is an ad. Someone telling me about their (open) project is not.

And when someone wants to use either and asks for help, is also (obviously) not an ad. Unless we see a flood of accounts posting trivial questions about a paid service to draw attention to it, but I kinda doubt it.

While I’m fine with people wanting to self-host stuff with closed software (this includes Windows and Plex, btw), I personally am not interested in having ads of any kind in the community.

To me self hosting is about controlling your data. While I wouldn’t use proprietary software myself for this, I just want to make it clear that I’m fine with people asking for help it advice about it. Just not ads, of any kind.