Not always, I only have a laptop. But I do have a terraform setup that quickly deploys a gitlab runner on my laptop for when I need it, then I destroy it when I’m done with it. Uses the libvirt provider, a CoreOS image, and ignition to configure and start the runner service immediately.

Did you try hosting it in a container? I’ve heard a lot of people had issues with dependencies, PHP, Apache until they moved to a container.

It doesn’t solve the optimization though. That’s still an issue for people I know who host nextcloud.

A lot of people prefer to take their security in their own hands. Enough people to make and maintain forks like these.

It’s a hybrid solution but I prefer putting my logs with an S3 provider, it’s just cheap storage that I don’t have to care about. And there are a lot of tools to do it with, like loki for example.