Alright, so you know like everyone I'm sure (if not, start) I like to browse stackoverflow and it's more subjective version programmers. Take a look at this question about the benefits of nightly builds for a one man team.
Having gone all these years on my own projects without a real build server setup -- I can say that I would never hesitate to use one for a non-trivial project, whether it was just me or N other people. Now the post above is about "nightly builds," but the precursor to that is an automated build. After that, you can run it nightly or by the hour -- there's no difference.
For me, using a tool like eg. Hudson makes your life a lot more easier. It guarantees you have a "working", reproducible copy of your project and if you want ready for deployment. It allows you to do other fun things like run your unit/integration tests on SCM changes (because you will forget!), run static code analysis tools and other metrics, and see trends over time.
We (my friend and I working on Recordings) have a separate Amazon EC2 instance running Hudson 24/7 just for that purpose. Our project is (relatively) tiny and there's only two of us. We've spent some hours setting it up -- and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again. We have it doing all kinds of stuff, such as:
- Monitoring our dev branch for changes; building and running unit tests whenever a change is detected
- Monitoring our production branch for merges (which have been previously tested); building, running unit and integration tests, minifying js/css code, and packaging the project into a WAR file for deployment.
- Jobs to synchronize our local test databases with the production database
- A job that polls the website every so often to make sure it's still online
- A job that runs findbugs and compiles tasks (ie TODOs) in source code
- Lastly: a job that deploys the last successful build from production to our production server
This allows us to be as lazy as possible, because the last thing you want to do is waste your time manually going through the build process when you're trying to fix bugs or merge new features!
And finally, as I said I find this useful even for solo projects that still have actual users* (other than yourself). Having your CI server able to build your application, create installers/docs/etc., and generate a setup file ready for distribution is very handy and will save you lots of time.
* I've used Hudson for the Recordings java webapp and some smaller C# desktop applications.
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