[turkishmonky]

For me, there are two reasons -

First of all, it's a sense of enjoying to tinker, same as a lot of people do with Raspberry Pis or Arduinos. The challenge is partly why I'm a developer in the first place.

Secondly, when storing large amounts of data (> 20 TB) or running high powered systems, cloud hosting can become very expensive very fast, especially if you don't need 99.9999% reliability (although for anything important - 3 backups, 2 devices, 1 offsite). I bought a used xeon 6-core server with 24gb of ecc ram on ebay for around $400 a couple years ago, along with a half dozen 5TB HDDs.

It makes it easy and was a mostly one time cost to mess around with DNA algorithms, docker/k8s, media encoding, home automation, and more. I've been considering upgrading to use an SAS backplane next, but with commercial 8 and 10TB hard drives getting cheaper, I may never need to jump to more drives then I have now.