I have been running my own servers, on and off since college. Here's some of my takes, and why it's always been worth the hassle, at least for me.

Using CloudNativePG and Barman Cloud to get Point-in-Time Recovery for Postgres DB's running in Kubernetes.

Setting up and tuning the DX Commander Expedition Antenna.

Looking at the information is stored in a Meshtastic channel URL, and decoding it.