I know something better and it's solar powered: Trees!
ChrislyBear
Initally some local site, then I transferred to GoDaddy, then to OVH (since GD is shit). One is still at Cloudflare (tried to move there, but they don't support al TLDs that I use, like ".eu").
For DNS I use Cloudflare. They provide a layer of privacy, i.e. your server IPs don't get exposed directly.
I recently started using https://github.com/immich-app/immich
It's basically a self hosted Google Photos and it's working really well. You can just mount your heap of photos into the container, declare it as external library and you're good to go.
After a few hours/days of training the face recognition, extracting meta data, generating thumbnails ans possibly transcoding videos you'll have a very responsive and easily searchable timeline of ALL your pictures and videos.
They do, in the EU. If you fuck up your customer's data, you'll face fines consisting of hefty percentages of your yearly revenue!
VPN limiting your bandwidth? Sounds like a CPU issue. You'll be surprised how much CPU overhead it takes to encrypt and decrypt traffic at such high speeds.
They LET us KEEP our data... so they're NOT (yet) using their market power to do what they want?
I think this headline got it wrong: If MS wants to do business with Europe, they have to follow our privacy laws or face hufe fines and ultimately the boot (which would benefit nobody).
One warning, though: After moving, you'll probably need another Google account again, to use the Play Store... it sucks.
I did as well, but then I went Microsoft and never looked back. Google's platform still feels like a shitty startup with missing stuff everywhere, compared to Azure (or AWS).
The only thing I'm missing is Google Photos, but there are self-hosted alternatives out, that I'll try soon.
I mean, they kill services willy nilly. Sure Gmail will probably survive, but the rest drove me away (Reader, Music, ...).
Regarding your Android purchases: At the time of my move I went through my list of apps I bought and tallied the ones up, that I still used. It was less than $50 of repurchases.
Don't let those old purchases hold you back. Cut this old baggage loose.
Evidence, that something doesn't exist?
Here: ...
You can also use this evidence freely to prove, that you didn't receive the package that you ordered.
to piss time and money away commuting
So much this! Why is it OK for us to waste our most valuable resource, time?? If you waste company time or assets, you'll be fired.
Have a look at GitLab.
I'm doing the same thing you are doing, but automatically. I have a repo per app and a few GitLab runners connected on my Raspis/servers. Everytime I push a change, the shell runner runs the commands configured for the pipeline. I don't have to lift a finger after changes.