The distinction in actual usage between using cloud, server, and homelab to describe their setup seems to be rooted in their purpose.

* Home Lab :: Running a partial/full enterprise IT stack for fun and education.

* Home Server :: Running primarily internal services like file storage, backups, media streaming, home automation, maybe some light networking.

* Home Cloud :: Running primarily external services on the public internet to replace 3rd party SaaS services. More often than not this is done with a VPS provider rather than physical hardware in your home.

So maybe you find the terminology annoying since everything is cloud these days but it's genuinely useful to us folks in the forums. You can also call "home cloud" selfhosting if you find it less jarring.

I am not sure that is a great distinction. A server is traditionally serving some resource, usually to multiple people. The idea behind 'home cloud' is to host 'slice' of a server yourself. Something that used to be hard because of the cost of hardware, making hosting only a few 'sessions' expensive.

Of course hardware hasn't been expensive for probably a decade or more. Today it is almost entirely a software problem. Or more precisely how to create independent quality software when many developers are employed by large corporations and no one wants to pay for development. I am not sure much is happening on that front.

if you run a "home cloud" on a raspberry pi 2/3/4 or an orange pic or something else entirely and it fails, will your "cloud" go down with the hardware?

If does go down then it's not cloud, no matter what hardware you're using.

In general, my rule of thumb is: what's the upper limit, the capacity or your wallet?

If the limit is the capacity, then it's HA.

If the limit is your wallet, then it's cloud.

My synology nas emails me every time it is down and every time Amazon or Comcast are down.

Last I checked, Amazon had the fewest 9s of the three (going back a few years...)

Dont break their delusions that "the cloud" is the prefect place were there is no down time, no security issues...

If you pay enough money to run things on their computers all problems are solved. it is only when you self host that is the problem :)

I see value in what you call home cloud. It has a lot of potential for distributing things and giving control of data back to people. Is there a place where I can follow developments like this?

Also, it seems like Western Digital would be an ideal player in the space since they want to bring processing to data storage via RISC-V.

Synology is probably the biggest player in this actually. They sell NAS hardware you can just add software to, with a selection of "home cloud" software of their own.

I don't see proprietary hardware+software bundles counting as a way to "give data back to the people".

On the hardware front I'll plug the project a friend of mine is working on[0]. As far as self-hosted software goes, the file sharing/sync section[1] of awesome self-hosted is great (the whole list is great).

[0] https://rootprojects.org/hub/

[1] https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#file-sharing-...

Unless your server offers some form of slicing of resources (containerization / virtualization) then it's difficult to describe it as a cloud in anything other than a buzzword.

I agree with you and appreciate the granularity that the distinctions afford.

Would you please recommend one of these forums?

I think most ISPs don't allow servers on residential, so one would be better off using a home cloud. Preferably one with blockchain to disrupt blocking or throttling.

Most ISP’s don’t actually care if you host a small server for a low number of users. As they shouldn’t.

Seperately, you’re not going to fool anyone by calling a server something else. (Not that “home cloud” is a bad term, but I think everyone realizes that still constitutes a server.)

> Seperately, you’re not going to fool anyone by calling a server something else.

If we had the logs I'd bet money that someone Googled "home cloud" to see if that would somehow get around hosting a server behind residential.

I'd also bet that even more people nodded "knowingly" while reading my sentence about blockchain.