I don’t have a home server yet but I’m exploring and sometimes I get confused about some posts here.
For example I saw a post asking for recommendation for a “self hosted budget management app”. Can’t you just install this type of app to your phone or pc? What’s the purpose here, will you host it and access it from a browser? Or do you only want to backup its data to your server?
I hope I don’t sound stupid please enlighten me.
Most people want services to be synced across devices. Using the budget app example, I just couldn’t possibly do all of my budget tasks from my phone alone. It’s too limited of a screen size and not all features are available within the app.
It’s an evolution of services and data , those who can, self host. Those who don’t self host, can - we don’t discriminate here 😉
All views in this post are of my own even though they are hosted on Reddit servers subscriptions sold separately & Batteries not included.
Look at Nextcloud for example. You can have a Google Drive alternative without google having any of your files. For some people it’s more important for others less. You also get more control of what you can do with it (for example add plugins etc.). It just depends on how you want to live your life. For example you can just create a Google account and have everything setup for you, or you can selfhost something like NC and setup everything your way.
Google recently had several cases of - which looks to be a developing situation - user personal data losses in the google drive side of operations
Thats right, the SaaS infrastructure that is based on storing user data on a cloud system lost about months of user data
Netflix recently also starting pulling toxic, egregious changes such that its basically insulting to people giving money to them
I have hardware laying around i decide to put to use. In the 3rd world a chatgpt subscription is the equivalent of $100 a month for very little benefit. Instead of queueing and using other people’s free resources better to use my own. There are also other reasons like backup strategy using cloud, NAS and archives which require your own hardware. A 1U chassis can fit a chinese recycled board with decent specs, a gpu and 4 hot swap drives cheap. Does decently if you pair with good network hardware so you only wake it up when needed. I use mikrotik for networking. Ive come to a point where my skills are good and paying for the cloud is a big waste.