I do everything for little to nothing in my life, and there's no reasonable default as to where the line is other than a cost/benefit comparison.
For my for many years owning a car was far more expensive than renting or getting taxis when needed. Owning a car absolutely would have been an expensive hobby, and the same is true for many in cities.
Having a personal server is exceptionally cheap. I had a VPS unnoticed recently I'd forgotten to cancel which cost about 10 dollars per year. That's about one minimum wage hour where I live. If you mean literally a personal server a raspberry pi can easily run a bunch of things and can cost about the same as a one off.
It's time, and upfront costs of software. If I want updates, and I do (security at least) I need some ongoing payments for those, and then I need to manage a machine. That management is better done by people other than me (as even if they earned the same as me they'd be faster and better) and they can manage more machines without a linear increase in their time.
So why self host? Sometimes it'll make sense, but the idea it should be the default to me doesn't hold. Little needs to be 100% in house, and sharing things can often be far more efficient. Software just happens to be incredibly easy to share.
You can’t outsource your privacy. Once you’ve given your information to a third party, that third party can and will probably use it as much as they can get away with. And legal protection from unreasonable search and seizure is also much weaker once you’ve already given out your information to a third party.
To generalize, and to also answer your other comments in a more general sense, you can’t outsource your freedom or civic responsibility. If you do, you turn yourself into a serf; someone with no recourse when those whom you place your trust in ultimately betray you.
(Also, just like “owning” a timeshare is not like owning your house, having a VPS is not self-hosting.)
> If you do, you turn yourself into a serf;
I'm really not sure I follow. This is about self hosting services, I can't really link (e.g.) hosting my data on github.com and turning myself "into a serf".
> someone with no recourse when those whom you place your trust in ultimately betray you.
There's obviously recourse - as an EU citizen (at least currently) it's possible that companies can lose 4% of their global turnover for misusing data.
> (Also, just like “owning” a timeshare is not like owning your house, having a VPS is not self-hosting.)
You can see from my post that I also put up the price of running a rpi if you didn't count a VPS as self hosting, which I absolutely would because to me it's about what services I run vs what services I pay others to run.
I found on my Linode account one last weekend. It’s been up since 2010 running Debian 5, no updates cause the repos are archived. Couple of PHP sites on there which I don’t control the domains of (but the sites where active).
Last email I have from the people there is 2012, a backup. The company apparently is not in business anymore (I know the domains registrar was on the personal account of the owner. He might have have auto renew on).
Backed up everything there and shut it down.
The trend definitely traces to the advent and eventual domination of asymmetric Internet connectivity. My first DSL connection was symmetric, so peer-to-peer networking and running servers ("self-hosting") were just natural. Since then, asymmetric bandwidth has ruled the US.
It's not so much that connectivity technology in the US is strictly poor—many cities have options providing hundreds of megabits or a gigabit or more of aggregate bandwidth. It's that the capacity allocation of some shared delivery platforms (e.g., cable) is dramatically biased toward download/consumption, and against upload/share/host. And there's no way for consumers to opt for a different balance. I'd gladly take 500/500 versus 1000/50. Even business accounts, which for their greatly increased costs are a refuge of symmetric connectivity and static IPs, are more commonly asymmetric today.
I think that this capacity imbalance and bias toward consumption snowballs and reinforces the broader assumptions of consumption at the edge (why make a product you self-host when most people don't have the proper connectivity?). This in turn means more centralization of services, applications, and data.
Nevertheless, even with mediocre upload speeds (measured in mere tens of megabits), I insist on self-hosting data and applications as much as I can muster. All of my devices are on my VPN (using the original notion of "VPN," meaning quite literally a virtual private network; not the more modern use of VPN to mean "encrypted tunnel to an Internet browsing egress node located in a data center"). For example, why would I use Dropbox when I can just access my network file system from anywhere? To me, it's a matter of simplicity. Everything I use understands a simple file system.
And most people actually do outsource their jobs. They are employees rather than working for themselves…
That might be true if you are in SF, NY, Toronto, London or some other major metropolitan with a good public transportation network. However for a large number of places in North America including metropolitans like LA, San Diego, Minneapolis, Dallas, having a car is almost as necessary as anything as that is the only way to get around the city without spending half a day in public transit.
Having a car is not a hobby when you live outside of a very dense city center. That's just the tool that enables you to live.
While I know that some car owners do just have it for fun, I think a lot more are because it's useful.
(edit: forgot to state country, Slovenia)
50€ for 950/300 (fibre by Orange) . I could get 10G/1G (fiber by Free) for 100€ but I could not use my own router inserted of the provided one.
Shared LTE phone and data plan (2 people) w/ 22GB/mo total is $160.
And I also pay about $800/mo for health insurance for 2 people.
Saudi is like this, I hear, Jakarta too. I assume there's more.
I think the problem is entirely caused by the US having absolutely abysmal private internet speeds and capacity. Since you can’t then have your own server at home, you are forced to have it elsewhere with sensible internet connections.
It’s as if, in an alternate reality, no private residences had parking space for cars; no garages, no street parking. Everyone would be forced to either use public transport, taxis and chauffeur services to get anywhere. Having a private vehicle would be an expensive hobby for the rich and/or enthusiasts, just like having a personal server is in our world.