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Comment by rsolva | Hacker News Reader

Hosting personal sites on cheap hardware at home makes even more sense to me after reading this horror story.

Why do not more technically inclined people self-host? Is it force of habit from how things are done at work?

I would much rather run the "risk" of some occasional dowtime, than keeping the lights on at all costs under a DDoS-attack.

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It's impractical because residential internet speed is very asymmetrical and behind NAT. You will still need external service to get around the NAT thing and the fact you don't have a static IP.

Only some ISPs are like that

You do not need a lot of speed to host a personal or hobbyist blog, and NAT is just something you configure once and it's done. I use my domain providers API to update the DNS records as soon as my public IP changes (with a tiny shell script on my server). I even host some semi-commercial sites from home and it is fine :)

I would much rather run the chance of some occasional downtime in exchange of being in control of the infrastructure and owning my own data. I really like the idea of a inter-connected net that is kinda spread all over, not super concentrated to a handful of data hubs.

Why not go for GitHub hosting then?

That could be a nice backup for when I experience downtime, but I would rather run a simple webserver at home for stuff that does not require extreme scale or a lot of resources. Hosting some websites at home is not that complicated and it keeps the dream of a distributed Internet alive!

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