Running a small personal server is mostly an exercise in restraint: fewer services, simpler scripts, and a weekly window where updates, backups, and log checks actually happen. Boring reliability is a feature.
The checklist that survives is short: patch, verify the backup restores, read the log tails, and remove anything you no longer use. Ten minutes, once a week.
The payoff is that when something breaks, the fix lands in the maintenance window instead of at 2 a.m.