Mine is definitely a hobby… possibly a borderline addiction. I am an IT person by day and then selfhost a bit at home. Most of my equipment is good old eBay specials (R720xd, R610), or just accumulated over the years (a few HP Microservers, RAID enclosures, etc).
The uptime is decent but my ISP isn’t great, plus one of the servers has been having issues so until I find a few hours to focus on it, it is not something I would consider “acting like a paid IT”.
Not to make myself sound like a bad IT person, but my homelab is held together with hope and scripts to recover when it goes down. One day I’ll cluster some lower power proxmox systems with portainer and ensure everything important has a way to fail over and backed up offsite (no, I’ll probably just take a nap if I get a free afternoon lol).
Sometimes people in these communities don’t realize how they come off, tone is hard over text, and I’m just as bad in person (thankfully I work remote most days).
When my paid service started giving me ads I stopped watching it. I’ve been paying them since before streaming and in the past couple years stopped paying because T-Mobile started paying. When T-Mobile quits paying we’ll close the account.