I've been using proxmox in my homelab for ~2y, and was doing everything bare metal for the ~3y prior to that (which is when I started my homelab).<p>At this point, I'd never use anything else. Proxmox "just works" in the best sense of the phrase. Never had uptime issues or anything (knock on wood). The only bare-metal install at this point is my plex server, which has a special level of importance in my close and extended family, so I baby it a little bit. A lotta bit.<p>I use it for a lot of things - a windows VM for running the mega client (so it's always on + isn't on a personal machine to snoop around), a postgres server that I use for the dev/qa versions of my personal stuff, a jenkins+wekan server, a vm just for minecraft servers, etc etc. It's so easy to just spin up a new VM when I need a clean slate for something random.<p>If I at some point actually start my own business, we'd be a proxmox shop for any non-cloud infra. And the cost-effectiveness of even a handful of 1-gen-old Dell servers on-prem (for things that don't need super high availability) is really hard to overstate when your budget isn't attached to VC funding. I would not run prod infra on-prem at this point, though: DigitalOcean makes the cloud far too affordable for that. But I'd probably have all CI, data analysis, etc etc local for a good long while.<p>One gripe I have is their subscription/license nag. It's annoying and tacky. I would gripe less if they had an option that made it feasible for me, a guy running it in his basement with 0 profit motive, to buy a license. Right now, it'd be (~$85 * 2 sockets * 4 servers) for me. Sorry, that's not happening, I could actually use DigitalOcean cheaper than that (and maybe even AWS). And it would be a huge % of my house's tech-related OpEx (compare that to ~80/yr for domains, $5/mo for my one droplet, $100/mo for internet, etc). If I had to name a price, I'd say $25/yr would be about the most I'd drop (as a guy with a basement server room, of course). Contrast this with Plex which I got a lifetime license for for like 150 bucks or something, and plex doesn't even really have an alternative. I could live without proxmox (libvirt is really annoying, but not <i>that</i> annoying), but I couldn't live without plex.<p>The pricing seems fine for businesses, though. I'd argue it's probably good RoI.