My VPS got throttled to 20% CPU, so I'm buying a mini PC for home

A few days ago I wrote about moving my coding agents and GitHub runner to a VPS. I'm now moving them again, this time to a mini PC that I'll keep on at home.

The reason is the CPU. My VPS provider limited it to about 20%. I never got an explanation from them, so all I can tell you is what I saw: the server was unusable. Agents crawled and builds and tests took far longer than they should. A machine I'd set up so work could carry on without me was now slower than my laptop.

I could have paid for a bigger plan, but I'd still be renting a share of someone else's CPU and relying on how they decide to limit it. I want the agents and the runner on a machine with full CPU all the time, and I want to own it so that nobody else's policy can slow it down.

So I'm buying a Minisforum MS-A2. I haven't bought it yet and I haven't picked the exact configuration, so I can't tell you how it performs. It will do the same job the VPS was meant to do: run OpenCode and Claude Code, host my GitHub self-hosted runner, and stay on when my laptop is closed.

The first article is still right about the part that mattered to me. Having the agents on a separate machine, instead of my laptop, is what lets me close the lid and walk away. Only the machine is changing.

Next I need to set it up and work out how I reach it when I'm not at home. I'll write up how that goes once it's running.