Somewhat of a misnomer. Yes, ZFS likes RAM, and yes it’ll use a lot if you let it. So the moar the better, obviously. But to suggest anything under 8GB is unworkable is a bit in the dramatic side. You may not get optimal performance in all cases but the system will function well enough to saturate a Gbps LAN and honestly if your budget is $600 with some found rust I doubt OP’s requirements are to stream several full bitrate 4K videos simultaneously.

Email and DNS. I have self-hosted both and I have no regrets. What I ALSO have is zero desire to do so again in the future.

Just bought some rack gear and I’ve been monitoring with the Kill A Watt - it’s not nearly as bad as folks make it out to be. My old tower based stack was maybe $20/mo whereas the new rack gear will be roughly $50/mo.

It’s certainly not nothing. But comparing price to value vs cloud hosts - setting aside topics like professional learning/development, hosting flexibility, privacy, and data sovereignty - it’s very reasonable (in my context and for my use cases).