Just too easy to get over a barrel trying to DIY it, and the first time ya screw it up, you lose a ton of credibility with employees which also has a great deal of value.

If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.

No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.

Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.

YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.

Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.

Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.

I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.

Will take a look - I’ve been kicking around the possibility of writing something quick and dirty to track my rapidly growing fountain pen hobby, what ink is in which pen, grade/size of paper on hand, and the like.

I’d much prefer using something that exists already, less distraction with design choices and bugs = more time to enjoy the hobby itself.

I’ve used TimeTrex in the past. For my needs “, it was overly complex.

This is one of those areas where I’d think long and hard about self hosting, if you’re doing more than tracking your own hours.

Lots of compliance risk here, and transferring some of that risk to the payroll company is part of what one pays for with those services.

In my case, I just needed to substantiate invoices for a couple of clients I contracted for, and I was strictly paying myself and once in a blue moon my wife.

Presently, my Fediverse presence is mostly self-hosted by one definition or another. This Lemmy instance lives on my server, and my Masto is hosted by a company dedicated to exactly that because it’s dirty cheap and one fewer thing for me to worry about.

Looking to add to the list.