[candiddevmike]

You can run a website off a cellular connection, you don't need fiber for that. The pendulum has never left decentralized from a tech standpoint, folks are just too lazy.

Home computer ownership is tanking, millennials were probably the last "power user" generation, and there's just no major interest in self hosting with the convenience of cloud. Even among tech professionals like HN.

[luma]

As someone with a full homelab with all the fixins, I don't self-host external-facing services without a VPN (meaning, no ports open into my network and thus no public web sites etc). This isn't because I don't know how, or that I'm too lazy, but rather an acknowledgement that it's a huge security risk and it isn't necessary.

My public facing stuff lives on cheap cloud services and is kept well away from my home network.

[quaintdev]

r/selfhosted would like to have word with you. That sub is increasing steadily.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted

[candiddevmike]

I'm a member, I even built a self hosted home organizer (https://homechart.app). It's a niche community with a very high cost of entry (time/money/skill).

[nirav72]

Regarding the money aspects of the high cost of entry - you can source cheap hardware from secondary markets. I just helped a friend setup a cheap selfhosting/homelab for his home. He bought couple of HP EliteDesk 800 G4 minis for $99/each with i5-8500T CPUs. Each came with 16gb ram. Both units had NVMe drives. So we just had to add couple of 2.5 SSDs 2tb ($50/each) for media storage. Running Ubuntu server with CasaOS ontop with handful of containers for media consumption (e.g Jellyfin) on one unit. The i5-8500T is new enough and supports Intel quicksync. So no GPU needed for transcoding. The second unit is running cloudflare tunnel daemon for things like his MicroBin(like pastebin), Wireguard VPN and NextCloud for external access. He still has plenty of room to add more applications to both servers.

[candiddevmike]

Where'd you find those, ebay? That sounds like a great deal.

[nirav72]

Amazon Renewed. But Ebay has them as well. Often a bit cheaper on ebay. If you spend a bit more time searching.

[gottorf]

Not the GP, but eBay is great for off-lease or just plain old computer equipment.

[rconti]

I think the pendulum DID swing, as The Cloud became more popular and connections became radically asymmetric with very slow upload.

[hinkley]

The story with the Cloud is that everything is distributed. The facts on the ground are that everything is more consolidated than it has ever been, mostly into 3 companies, and dozens of datacenters each.

I don't think the Internet has been this small in that respect since the early 90's.

[candiddevmike]

10 Mbps upload is plenty fast for hosting things like websites and web apps.

[ndriscoll]

Not really. For my daughter's birthday, I put together an album of around 100 photos to share with family. That came out to 386 MB at default quality settings in digikam, which would take 5 minutes to download at 10 Mb/s. Even for smaller things where maybe I share 10-15 photos from a day out, that'd take ~30 seconds to load. I can drop the quality just for sharing on the web, but I'd rather be able to just share it.

Likewise with backups, each photo is ~40 MB for RAW files, so 10 Mb/s can take all day to backup a couple hundred photos.

That's without even getting into video. Off the camera, video files are ~200 Mb/s. Backups of the raw footage take forever, and sharing at the original quality is a non-starter.

[candiddevmike]

> 10 Mbps upload is plenty fast for hosting things like websites and web apps.

I made no guarantees for file sharing or backups...

[ndriscoll]

I would consider things like home movies and photo albums to be one of the main use-cases for a personal website (photo albums are pretty much what everyone in my social network uses Facebook for today). If you restrict to text websites, we could all get by with < 1Mb/s internet connections.

Backups are something else sure, but for personal hosting, the world is easier if you can just plop photos into a directory with maybe a simple html (or in my case xml) file and not deal with things like generating thumbnails or different quality settings.

[rconti]

10Mbps is barely enough to send the ACKs on a 250Mbps download. Maybe it's fine as a dedicated connection, but you might not want to be hosting anything on your home connection.