I Replaced Google Drive with a Home Server That Costs Almost Nothing

The author replaced a ₹650/month Google One 2TB plan by repurposing an old HP Pavilion laptop as a home server running Nextcloud, Samba, and other open-source tools—costing only about ₹70/month for a domain. To work around Indian ISPs' CGNAT restrictions, the setup uses a two-path architecture: a Cloudflare + Oracle free VPS public path for external sharing, and a private VPN path for personal remote access. This is Part 1 of a 5-part series covering the motivation and architecture, with implementation details to follow.