[gh02t]

Really depends on what you're doing re: homelab. Linode's pricing is still way more than what you're gonna pay for your own hardware at just about any tier. My home server is 16 core/64 GB and I use most of that to host stuff. It cost about $1250 in parts and about $10/mo in electricity. Linode's monthly pricing for a dedicated instance 16 core/32 gig shared CPU is $160/mo, so the breakeven point is around a year for slightly worse hardware. I expect to get at least 5 years of use out of this hardware so it's not even close.

Even on the lower end a recycled mini-PC will run you like 100 bucks and get you 8 core/8 GB memory and negligible power. Versus the cheapest Linode plan at $5/mo for 1 core/1 GB. That's more competitive and might work for some people but even then self-host is still viable. Your own time is valuable of course, but most of the time in my experience is not dealing with the hardware itself, it's setting up the software and maintaining it. Which you still have to do with Linode.

[blodkorv]

Do you really use all of that computing power for the stuff that is running on the server. All of the home lab setups i have seen have been way over powered and under used. Lots of "wasted" computing power to just be powered on and never really utilized.