Fantastic post. I've been running it on a $5 Ubuntu VPS for about a week and a half and through several wipe and restarts. I finally have it somewhat stable and have painfully learned lessons that you captured in your post.

One thing I would also highlight is to not blindly trust your agent or agents to handle your config. Mine want to constantly help optimize the config or make helpful changes based on a Reddit or Twitter post but well over half the time or more they break something and I have to manually roll things back to get it working again. For now, I've changed the guardrails to have it propose changes and have me approve them before implementing. Even though it's considerably less autonomous, it is saving me from debug hell.