The article was not intended for personal small projects though. Secondly, one can start working on hdfs to learn something new, and they don't need to have good hardware and cloud too, they can build a small instance on a standard pc to start with, but as you said for small and hobby projects its not recommended to do so which I agree completely. The article is for those who are working around the similar tech and are facing issues in the process. Despite but your suggestons are valuable and I would love to improve my article based on them. Thanks a lot!