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Re:The Indie Web Is Dead, Long Live the Indie Web by senko on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @06:06AM (#33786063)
I somewhat agree with you (and with stuff like Tailscale it's incredibly easy to set up), with one big caveat, which you hinted at in the fourth footnote: you still need to maintain your home server.

I am confident that my VPS provider (DigitalOcean) can maintain VPSs' better than I can (or want to), for example: automigrate for hadrware faults, cheap daily/weekly backup, and making sure it's up & running after power cycling the home (which is an infrequent but not unheard of situation where I live).

Even for beefier setups, Hetzner (my go to provider for dedicated hw) still looks more appealing than setting it up at home, when I calculate hardware cost. If you have spare hardware sitting unused anyways, I'd agree.

But on the main point we agree - if you know how to administer a server, it's easy to host, either home or on a VPS.

The main drawback I see for common people is that they aren't gonna read up on nginx and postgres configs or set up minikube locally. That requires one-click setup for local use.

Re:The Indie Web Is Dead, Long Live the Indie Web by dspillett on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @07:20AM (#33786620)
> more appealing than setting it up at home, when I calculate hardware cost

That one can be complex. My home server does mainly private stuff so external bandwidth/latency isn't a big issue. Even accounting for cycling drives out¹² and other involuntary maintenance³ the cost of putting the machine together and keeping it running is lower than I'd have spent on the monthly costs of a similarly specced machine with a good provider.

Power costs have made me reconsider that a bit in recent months, but hosting providers are putting up prices as they are subject to similar cost increases too so I'll wait a bit and see how that settles before making major changes.

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[1] I've had a few failures over the years, though thanks to RAID I've never actually lost data due to that⁴.

[2] Also for space upgrades, but that is an issue for externally hosted options too.

[3] The PSU went fzzzt early last year.

[4] Actual (temporary) data loss due to human error has occurred, but backups resolved those occurrences.