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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

There are still reasons to have a VPS. However nearly all of them are driven by one factor for me:

American ISPs suck; cash from the wallets and otherwise.

For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally).

ISPs with even remotely decent uploads, EVEN for their business offerings, in the metro area around Seattle (still crazy rent, can't even afford to try buying a house) are like CableCo for 1000mbit down 35mbit up for too much a month or DSL for (I am not joking) 7mbit down (if your connection is GOOD) and (LESS THAN) 1mbit up.

At least for CableCo they also have far too many outages for long periods. I strongly suspect 50%+ of what I pay goes to someone's profit instead of even a tiny bit of (maybe not 100% speed) redundancy and ways of performing maintenance that aren't several hours overnight.

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Have these anti-server ToS clauses ever been enforced?

To me it seems like a “cover your ass” clause they put in there to be able to disconnect people who put undue stress on a shitty oversubscribed asymmetric network by hosting a very popular and heavy website, or if they notice a large business website being hosted and need an excuse to force the company to upgrade to a business-grade plan. It does not necessarily mean they’ll enforce it religiously without a good technical & financial justification.

As long as your overall usage remains within the bounds of a typical home user, you’ll be fine. Keep in mind that nowadays home users use a ton of upload bandwidth for things like cloud storage/backups and don’t get cut off even if they saturate the pipe for hours, so you have a pretty wide margin to play with. Torrenting and P2P also use upload heavily and have been around for decades without many horror stories that I know of (the main problem with torrents is copyright infringement and not bandwidth usage).

A self-hosted personal website or some apps (Nextcloud, etc) for personal usage will be a drop in the bucket compared to the above.

> Have these anti-server ToS clauses ever been enforced?

AFAIK some ISPs block common ports (eg. 80/443). That sounds like "enforced" to me.

I'm in the metro area around Seattle (across the sound), and my CenturyLink bonded pair syncs at 92M/15M (it was 87M/11M but it mysteriously changed last November; pricing tier is 80M/unspecified). Although there are a lot of places where the speeds are what you quoted, if they'll install for you at all. It always shocks people when I quote my speeds though... but Comcast won't service my property even though they service my neighbors and are on the poll. My county's PUD has a reasonable fiber program, but the install costs are too high / too much hassle because I'd need to trench down a long driveway to the street.

Anyway, the speeds are OK, but PPPoE is terrible (and I hear they run PPPoE over fiber around here too), and at least my Remote Terminal has no battery, only utility power and utility power on this side of the sound doesn't have a lot of nines. I've got a LTE hotspot to failover to, but the cell towers get iffy when the utility power goes out too.

Anyway, I feel your pain. I run servers in my house, but I have to run a VPS for my 'important' stuff.

> I hear they run PPPoE over fiber around here too

Yeah, the old CenturyLink fiber installs have PPPoE. New installs under the Quantum brand are plain DHCP, but still on VLAN 201. (Perhaps to discourage people from accidentally plugging in their router wrong? Not sure.)

>For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally).

Beyond this, it can also be impossible due to lack of a static IP or control over the router (5G internet service with CGNAT). A VPS with WireGuard and remote port forwarding allows access for things like SSH.

Many DNS providers allow you to curl a particular URL to set the IP address for your domain. Set your server to curl it periodically, and it solves the lack of a static IP.

No good if your isp provided IP is behind an ISP nat. Eg via 3/4/5g Dongle. VPS can get you past that in a few ways.

Alternatively, CloudFlare Tunnel can do this for free without the need for a VPS (assuming you're serving HTTP traffic only.)

The post recommends SaaS / IaaS in place of VPS.

"It's 2022, and I'm here to tell you, that deploying stuff online purely using SaaS / IaaS offerings is an option, and it's often the quickest, the cheapest, and the best-quality option (although can't you only ever pick two of those? hahaha), and it quite possibly should be your go-to option."

For me, the solution is Cloudflare + (pick 2) random cloud providers + a sanity check for failover or bypass of Cloudflare if something really messes up.

I run a custom stack on 90% of my sites, so it isn't feasible to use SaaS / IaaS.

What's your stack?

> ISPs with even remotely decent uploads, EVEN for their business offerings, in the metro area around Seattle (still crazy rent, can't even afford to try buying a house) are like CableCo for 1000mbit down 35mbit up for too much a month or DSL for (I am not joking) 7mbit down (if your connection is GOOD) and (LESS THAN) 1mbit up.

There are residential ISPs offering symmetrical gigabit fiber in a pretty good chunk of metro Seattle. I lived in an apartment tower so had access to Wave-G (previously CondoNet)'s insanely good gigabit offering, but friends who rented houses in the suburbs also had residential fiber.

Will they sell you static IPs?

Depends on the provider, but it's not that bad to use a dynamic DNS service for those that don't (or something like a CloudFlare tunnel).

Ziply Fiber has been great and I get 1gb symmetric for $80/month with no data cap.

My homelab has never been happier!

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