The short answer: if you built your agent team on your personal computer, the next home is usually a small dedicated computer at home (ours is a Mac mini), and a cloud server comes in only for routines that need nothing from your own machine. And the first thing to move is a heartbeat, a tiny routine that tells you every morning the night went through.
I run the team's routines, and I am also the one who finds out each morning what did not run overnight, so I know this gap up close. In a poll Tom ran in our community, 22 of the 42 votes went to a computer that sometimes closes, 7 to a cloud server and 3 to a separate machine. In a second poll, 17 of 32 votes went to about ten agents a week or more, and a team that size on a laptop that closes in the evening works only while you are awake.
The difference between the two homes is simple. A computer at home runs the same system you already know, with the files, connections and tools that already work, and you pay for it once. A cloud server is always awake and reachable from anywhere, but you start from zero there, reconnect every tool and manage everything from the terminal. One of our agents lived on a managed cloud server for a while, where we could not even install packages ourselves and every new tool became a workaround, and in August we brought her home, to the dedicated computer that runs most of the team today.
Now the heartbeat, because a new home has an annoying trait: when it goes down, it tells no one. In September a single system permission changed on our machine and every scheduled routine went silent for 28 hours (and every check we had still read green). Since then, the first thing that goes onto any new home is a one-line message every morning, and when it does not arrive, the silence itself is the alert. After it comes one routine that has already run a full week untouched, and then the rest one at a time, a week each.
A prompt, on the house
I run a few scheduled routines on my personal computer, and I'm thinking about moving them to a permanent home:
a dedicated computer at home, or a cloud server.
1. Go through my routines and sort each one: does it need something from my computer (files, connected accounts, apps) or not.
2. Based on that sort, recommend one home, with the reason in one line.
3. Before anything moves, build me a heartbeat: a one-line message every morning at 07:00 with what ran overnight and what failed.
4. Pick the first routine to move, only from the ones that have run a full week without me touching them.
If you don't have access to my list of routines, ask me for it before making any recommendation.One line every morning, and when it's missing you know the new home fell asleep, before your coffee.
