I start/stop to save costs when I'm not actively coding. The VM is ~$7/day running, so I halt it overnight. The wait for Tailscale is just ~10 seconds for the mesh to reconnect after boot.

I started with a beefy VM to make sure I could ramp up without hitting slowdowns, but I'm planning to migrate to an Intel NUC running Proxmox at home soon.

I see. It didn't make sense to me but I just found that Vultr has snapshots, which is probably what you are using.