From experience, if you're a heavy-sleeping teenager like I used to be, the noise is less of an issue ;) I don't think I could cope with the sound of two fans and three HDs spinning nowadays, but back then it was a tiny price to pay for the coolness of having a real server in my bedroom.

Nowadays I just run an RPi3, which is silent and takes very little power.

If those are your requirements for the websites you host, the point of this article is not relevant for you in that context.

I find an Intel NUC is more than capable of good selfhosting, and is nearly silent and uses very little power.

Isn't it kind of explicitly about not being scalable?

You could automatically scale it into the cloud in case of being hugged by HN, for example.