seg6 replaced a Hetzner VPS with a phone from a drawer, and the part worth stealing isn’t the savings — it’s the discipline. Stock Android stays because its drivers already work; Termux runs the show; every app deploys from Git as a digest-pinned image via Ansible. Not a pet assembled from shell history.
What actually got me: a battery-backed machine with a 5G modem whose ingress is one outbound Cloudflare Tunnel, so the hostnames follow it between networks. That is precisely the shape of server I want on a boat, where power blips and the uplink changes with the marina.
Before buying another mini PC — DRAM prices being stupid right now — I’d audit the drawer first. Eight ARM cores and a built-in UPS, already paid for.
The story — seg6 moved their personal infrastructure from a Hetzner VPS to a CMF Phone 1 with eight ARM cores, 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of flash, Wi-Fi 6, a 5G modem and a built-in battery. An attempt to flash postmarketOS soft-bricked the device, so the final setup keeps stock Android: Termux hosts SSH, Caddy and runit, applications run from digest-pinned ARM64 OCI images in a chroot after PRoot proved too slow for Chrome, Ansible manages the whole host, and a Cloudflare Tunnel plus Tailscale keep the services reachable when the phone moves between networks. (Source)