The reason for this article is the willingness to explore a bit and summarise for myself if this it is worth running your own smart home if you are always busy, but technology "semi-capable" person... 

I have been running my own Home Assistant instance since 2018 and over time have been able to both spend some time and money on it as well as have had my "time-offs" when being busy in other areas has limited my abilities to efficiently run my HASS.

My approach to this has always been not about doing things probably cheaper but to have fun and experiment to an extent which doesn't make you sit for hours on daily basis on maintenance or fixing broken stuff...

Over time I have moved my HASS instance from HAOS to Raspberry PI to Docker and in its latest re-incarnation back into Proxmox hosted HAOS as virtual resource.

In short about the specifics of my HASS deployment:

1. I use NabuCasa for remote access just for the sake of simplicy and I think the 5-6 EUR/month I pay them is much cheaper than dealing with DDNS or similarly opening up infrastructure and then ensuring it is consistently up to date :)

2. The core of the deployment I have at the moment contains following items:

   1. Proxmox with CEPH enabled on 3 older Lenovo/Dell microPCs

   2. HASS on HA OS as a VM on Proxmox

   3. Frigate NVR for "smart" video surveillance

   4. NodeRed (at the moment mainly for alarm automations from Frigate

   5. MQTT to handle some Tasmota, Valetudo and Frigate messages

   6. ESP Home to manage my ESP 8266 devices like Sonoff Wifi Switches and Sonoff relays which have been flashed to ESPHome

   7. HACS to do some integrations (like Bosch thermostat, Valetudo, BMW, FordPass, etc)

3. I have most of the things on Wifi (except cameras) with two networks.

   1. One for only 2.4Ghz (where most of the ESP 8266 devices reside)

   2. One for daily use which mainly supports 5Ghz (but in theory also can revert to 2.4ghz)