I'm self-hosting, and the server is a Ryzen 7 3900x with 128 Gb of non-ECC RAM. It sits in my living room next to a cheap UPS. I did snag one of the last remaining Optane 900Ps off Amazon, and it powers the index and the database--and I really do think this is among the best hardware choices for this use case. But beyond that it's really nothing special, hardware-wise. Like it's less than a month's salary.

It runs Debian, and all the services run bare metal with zero containerization.

Modern consumer hardware can be absurdly powerful if you let it.

Like I have no doubt a thousand engineers could spend a hundred times as much time building a search engine that did pretty much the same thing mine does, it would require a full data center to stay running and be much slower. But that's just a cost of large scale software development I don't have to pay as a solo developer with no deadline, no planning and a shoestring budget.