A cluster of my own At the end of last year, I noticed my fleet of VPSes, small dedi boxes, and shared hosting accounts had ballooned. I'd gotten all of them inexpensively (many from deals listed on LowEndBox ), but in total I was paying a significant amount for one-off machines. The $5 a month here and $10 a month there was adding up, and I was paying over $80 a month on hosting across several providers. I needed to maintain a page in my Obsidian notes just to manage all the different boxes I had, which credentials they were using, what OS they were on, when I'd last updated them, and when they were due for renewal. Because they were so cheap, it wasn't uncommon to get a "we've been bought" or worse, a "we're shutting down" email from those providers from time to time, often with limited windows to save my data. So, this past Black Friday (basically a sacred holiday in its own right on the LowEndTalk forums), I went in with a game plan.…