While I'm not so confident that it's a given that performance or reliability increase after a system is distributed, let's assume that it's true.
This turns my question into: does OpenTTD need more performance or reliability for its website?
I can kind of see how DDOS protection might be useful, but... I don't protect my stuff against DDOS: the loss of service is nullified by the effort and risk required to set it up and maintain. What would that calculation look like for a random forum?
>While I'm not so confident that it's a given that performance or reliability increase after a system is distributed, let's assume that it's true.
I think you can unequivocally agree that a distributed service thats designed to be fault tolerant is going to more more reliable than your MacBook Pro sitting in you closet on your home Internet connection.
>I can kind of see how DDOS protection might be useful, but... I don't protect my stuff against DDOS
If you don't care about your stuff going down, then it doesn't matter. If you don't care about it, then comparing it to a setup where that is a feature, isn't an even comparison.
Even if you hosted this in your own closet on your MacBook Pro, OpenTTD's setup is still somewhat competitive. You might say "Oh I get that all for free" well a MacBook Pro costs money, your home internet costs money (although most consumer Internet is going to push back if you do more than 1Tb up a month- this is the cue for everybody who wants to rave about how great their Internet is to be contrarian below), you're paying electricity, and rent- even hosting your MacBook Pro is a marginal benefit from other expensive you already have, it's still not _free_.