And data recovery services would have a field day :)
Self hosting in 2022 is not exactly a walk in the park. Besides the obvious security risks of data loss/theft through exploits, you also have a challenge making anything as redundant as a cloud service.
Most major cloud services offer multi geographical redundancy, meaning if one data center completely vanishes (like the OVH fire), your data is safe in another data center, and hastily restoring redundancy to yet another data center.
You get versioning as well, i.e. OneDrive offers unlimited versions for 30 days, allowing you to roll back your entire account to a date 30 days in the past in case of malware attacks.
Add to that redundant hardware, power, internet, spare parts, physical access control, fire prevention and more.
On the other side of the fence, we have that old gaming PC that has been repurposed as a "home server", running Unraid, or slightly better TrueNAS in Raid-Z1, and not a backup in sight because "raid". Furthermore it probably hasn't been patched in months unless it defaults to auto updating.
I'm well aware that there are people that are serious about self hosting (i used to be one), but the above repurposed gaming PC is what you'll get in A LOT of the cases.
And to top it all off, with electricity prices in Europe as they are right now, the cloud is cheaper than running your own hardware, except of course for multi TB storage. A 4 bay Synology consuming 45W costs about €18/month in electricity alone, and a 60W server costs €23.5/month.
I think just renting a machine and installing your own software/OS is also beneficial to using cloud services from a privacy perspective, e.g. running your own NextCloud on Hetzner or the likes.
I didn't say cheap, though that would help of course. But people aren't opposed to buying hardware if the UX is worth it (see: Apple). And I do think it could be worth it if installing services was as easy as installing apps on your phone. No signup process, and data can be shared between services.
I'm imagining something like Synology NAS with it's apps [1], but with more user submitted services, and better connectivity between them. If Umbrel/Yunohost/Sandstorm/Cloudron released a pre-configured raspberry pi with some sane defaults, that could be a step in the right direction.
HP (?) tried pushing the home server pretty hard several years ago, but I don’t think it ever took off, as I haven’t heard about it in any mainstream sense in years. But to your point, it was just running Windows Server, which isn’t exactly consumer friendly.
For something like a home server to take off it really needs to have that killer app. For most that would probably be something like Plex/Jellyfin, but your average user is just going to sign up for streaming services instead. And if a media server is all you want, Synology can take care of that pretty well. I recently moved my Plex server from a Mac mini (which I used in some form since Plex was first launched) over to a Synology NAS using Docker. Of course that’s not very user friendly, but assuming the native Plex app is better for the average Joe.
With so many cloud providers that make it easy to get to your data anywhere in the world via your laptop or phone, it’s hard to argue in favor of moving to home servers for much of anything. Sure, you can access it remotely if you set it up, but it’s going to be more hit and miss, and when things don’t work you’re just stuck hoping you can fix it.
That’s a fair point, but there are lots of people who want one less thing to manage - the underlying infrastructure is a large piece to offload from the mental load of self hosting.
exactly, the stuff I self host is based on debian-stable or debian-testing amd64 starting from a very normal barebones debian CLI-only configuration (about 1GB of disk space occupied), and adding stuff from there.