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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

I like the gist and spirit of this, of course, but isn’t this basically impossible in today’s day and age? For instance, if I want to host a small web server running in my closet to serve cat memes to a small number of users, I still am beholden to my ISP who 1) must allow me to host a web server in its TOS and 2) provide me a static address.

I don’t really see any way to get around corporations on the internet, unless I’m missing something.

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I think that depends on how robust you want to be.

I don't have a static IP, but it only changes on the order of weeks or months. So a dynamic DNS configuration with a 5 minute TTL works fine for me.

I have no idea if web hosting is in my ISP's TOS, and I also don't care.

The easiest choice today is to use either GitHub Pages or Netlify to host your website. You can literally just drag and drop files on their Admin web page and have something immediatelly published online.

If you want to run code instead of just keep a static website, then you may need to get a cheap server from a multitude of companies that offer that (Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS etc) but I find that you can almost always get away with static sites which require next to no work and will stay up as long as those companies are still functioning (or don't shut down the free plan).

I don't know about elsewhere, but I regularly set up small self-hosted web servers at my home (Midwest US) and have never heard a peep from my ISP about it. Some of the aforementioned servers get 25 - 50 unique visits on a high day, and my ISP couldn't care less. I'm not sure they would unless I was calling a lot of traffic, which is not really a huge concern for Small Webbers. We are few and relatively unnoticed by the larger Internet, which is just the way we like it.

1) Haven't really checked, but...

2) I have a fixed IPv4 address, and a dynamic IPv6. So far the latter also seems to be fairly stable, and I host my webpages on both IPv4 and IPv6 these days.

My server is a ThinkPad X240 with VMware ESXi which in turn host Ubuntu for SSH, Web, etc... And a Pi-hole VM just to block the "wost" of the internet.

ISPs that allow hosting web services are fairly common, but you're right, if all your local providers forbid it, you're probably out of luck.

For your second point, Dynamic DNS is super useful. I've had a good experience with noip.com/ddns.net, but there are plenty of other options out there.

If anything I think it's easier today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. There are plenty of free static hosts, free tiers on various cloud hosts for interactive sites, and services like ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnels that can safely expose a home server to the internet.

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