Guides
Keeping a Mac awake and online
Sleep settings, power, logins and unattended restarts: the unglamorous configuration that decides whether a Mac is really a server.
Sleep is the first thing to check
When a self-hosted service is intermittently unreachable and nothing in the logs explains it, the machine was almost certainly asleep. A Mac conserves power aggressively by default, which is right for a laptop and wrong for a server.
Preventing display sleep is not the same as preventing system sleep, and that distinction catches people out. Set the system never to sleep in Energy Saver or Battery settings, then confirm it rather than assuming. A machine that still sleeps will go on doing it quietly.
Power, and the laptop question
A Mac serving on battery will sleep when it runs low no matter what you configured, so anything always-on needs to stay plugged in. On a laptop that raises a fair question about holding a battery at full charge for months. Recent macOS manages this better than it used to, and a mini sidesteps the question entirely.
Decide what should happen after a power cut too. A Mac that does not come back on its own has to be started by hand, which is no help when you are not there.
The login nobody plans for
Services that run as your user need that user to be logged in. After a restart, a Mac sitting at the login window is running almost nothing. FileVault makes this stricter still: the disk stays encrypted until someone types the password, so nothing starts before then.
That is not a reason to turn FileVault off on a machine sitting in your home. It is a reason to know that an unattended reboot on an encrypted Mac needs a person, and to plan for it.
Network, briefly
Use ethernet if the machine can reach a cable. Wi-Fi is fine for a laptop that browses. A server answering several devices at once does better on a wired connection that does not renegotiate, roam, or share airtime with a microwave.
What still fails after all of this
No amount of configuration solves a power cut, a provider outage, a macOS update that reboots overnight, or someone unplugging the machine to charge a phone. A Mac at home has an uptime ceiling set by your flat, and tuning does not raise it.
The useful move is to make failures loud instead of pretending they will not happen. Know when your service stopped answering, and know whether the cause was the machine, the connection or the software. MacServe reports only what it can see, whether the Mac checked in, whether Linux is running, whether the tunnel is connected, and names which one is wrong rather than showing a single unexplained error.