it's cloying how people (individuals and SMEs) forget that in the present time in vast part of the world we have FTTH with enough bandwidth and low enough ping that's MUCH better than a cheap VPS or someone else server. The only needed thing is a fixed IP, witch is pretty available anyway.

A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much powerful and much more flexible than living on someone else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need, it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn mainframe.

Yes, self/home hosting is an option for some. but maintaining a server is not as easy as you make it sound. Power, cooling, noise, spare hardware, network etc are all factors that are taken care of by a provider, that are not easy to replicate.

And even if you can self-host, fighting against (D)DOS attacks is not something I have seen done at any consumer ISP.

At a personal|SME level? Who might want do DDOS John Smith or Pop's store? How much iron you need for such usage? That's without counting the various "datacenters horror stories" about how badly many providers are really without appearing.

My homeserver is a simple NixOS, so I have to maintain just a config, easy to replicate anytime without manual setups or complex orchestration, it's a small celeron machine with 32Gb ram and two sata classic disks + 2 nvme on a PCIe adapter card, total cost around 300€ few years ago, cooling is juts the home cooling, power it's free on sunny days (domestic p.v.) and otherwise it's still cheaper than the cheapest VPS, plus it can do much more. It's run my HA, Asterisk (for having some VoIP numbers on my deskphone and diverting call to my mobile when I'm not at home, nothing more), a small video-surveillance setup, fetchmail+maildrop+notmuch to serve mails via muchsync, etc etc etc a minimal equivalent VPS setup would costing me around 100+€/month, performing much less. If my server die I have a spare motherboard+cpu a little bit outdated but powerful enough drives are both mirrors from different brands, I have some cold spare anyway shared if needed with my main desktop etc in case of a complete crash I have my config, few kb of text, and I can replicate it anywhere. For personal usage is MUCH more than any classic hosted setup.

The only real issues is for most:

- knowing the software stack they need, witch is rare, because yes maintain a classic Arch or FreeBSD server it's much less comfy than NixOS/Guix System especially if you never heard of them but heard a gazillion of recommendations to use k*s or docker, proxmox and co AT HOME some even trying on raspi sbc...

- some minor legal and hw things, depending on your home and how much the temp mount in summer inside.

Essentially for most it's just about knowing the sw stack witch is a big issue since no university seems to be interesting in really teaching FLOSS nowadays and most professors themselves have very little practical knowledge.

I won't bore you with the details of my home setup, and I do host from home with both static IPv4 and IPv6 and everything (ok ok, two details: it's all freebsd on enterprise hardware) I will repeat: it is an option for some. and if you fall in the small group that has everything on green for a home hosted setup, it is the best option.

But thinking this is for more then a very very small group of people is not confirm reality.

And I really applaud you for having a setup that generates enough power so for you it turns out to be free. If only I could get a setup like this. For the biggest part of the population this is, unfortunately, not an option.

Also, there is a very big difference between running k*s, docker, whatever at home in a homelab, and hosting your stuff at home. A homelab is to learn, learning means breaking stuff all the time. hosting things dont really combine with that. Most people that actually host things at home have 2 setups, one that hosts the online tools and one homelab where they can break stuff at their will.

At the end of the day, for the majority of people throwing a couple of dollars per month to a company to handle all this crap is the better option :)

Well, while both option exists and obviously anyone is (almost) free to choose, I still fail to see convenience in living on someone else computer. Anyway, allow me a different scenario: you are Foo Bar, you have a bunch of documents and many photos/videos/music etc no computer skills beyond clicking around. You ask someone more knowledgeable, local or remote, but still a single human, if he/she can create your infra to own your data. he/she gives you a list of stuff to buy, instructions to assemble or came to you/send it assembled and ready to you, a usb stick with a live system to deploym the config (NixOS/Guix system) on it. You are now operational, your infra it's still a black box for you but you own the config, so you can give it to someone and in case of trouble or the need of changes you know who to contact. You pay a certain capex and small opex. Your infra evolve following you. Your contact disappear, another came and propose to rebuild anything, no data loss, he/she can use your iron, your data and knowing anything from the config. You are on again and the event loop keep running.

How different is from choosing let's say FileHoster inc who works well enough, albeit much less than your infra, and have no capex, than it experience a big issue (cfr. Gandi/FR two times few years ago) all your data are lost, you still have some here and there you get up again on another one, than it became too expensive, you switch from another, ...

In the two scenario:

- on one side you spent in capex more than in opex, so you spent at a specific point in time, in an inflationary economy, instead of being vampirized every month;

- you are tied to your infra reliability and consumer grade assembled iron it's pretty reliable for such usage, as most well know giants are for the same usage/point of view BUT on one side the reliability is in your infra, something you can tune, learn and check, on the other it's about third party decisions who can happen at every point in time without anything you can do.

You've certainly read countless of time about $BigName impromptu ban for instance. You've certainly experienced terms of use unilateral changes, sometimes ok for you sometimes not. Where is the balance?

If you live in a Korean goshiwon -alike you can't host while you might still have docs/photos etc you have no choice, but when you have it and honestly MOST people who need IT at a certain level do have the choice, at least formally, if he/she knows it exists, then where is the convenience? Trusting the market on one side, with little to no capex but much bigger opex and uncertainty or more capex, less opex and uncertainty? Think about schooling: what we do in most part of the world? A big initial capex (long school time) than profiting for life on the acquired knowledge or a jump in the wild than we will learn on the go?

In the mean people are honest, so trusting someone else IF you can verify or the exposure it's low it will generally end up well anyway, otherwise... I trust myself more than someone else shielded under a corp name, eventually in another country (so legal protection issues, geopolitical risks and so on)...