I disagree that you need a lot of space for self hosting. Unless you want to host streaming content for thousands of users, Intel NUC or raspberry PI on top of your router is plenty enough to host nextcloud, some webservers with decent traffic (assuming you have gigabit connection, which is now commonplace), email, backups and media server for family and friends.

Wouldn't it be rather awkward to set up a redundant RAID array on one of those though? Which is something you definitely want on a server that stores backups. I know you can obviously connect as many hard drives as you want to a Raspberry Pi via USB, but that feels wrong for a server. Intel Nuc at least has Thunderbolt and probably some internal SATA ports.

> You can rent a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting company, and even that would be self-hosting.

That's what I do. I use Linode/Akamai, which now has encrypted VPS instances.

Ideally, I'd have my own hardware but I don't want to deal with the maintenance and failure cases (house fire, etc). I think a VPS is a solid tradeoff.

Agreed. I have shifted a lot of my services to VPSes just because it's easier to deal with. However, it comes with less freedom and control

> It must be nice to have enough space at home to dedicate some to a server room (servers are noisy btw). But many people live in small apartments in a city and so don't have that luxury.

Absolute bullocks.

For most people running a home server, a Raspberry Pi is plenty and is about the size of a deck of cards, maybe two decks if you want extra storage and use an external storage device.

If you need something beefier, you can probably just use an old laptop, or maybe a full second PC under your desk if you need more. You could easily fit a Threadripper or Xeon system with 128 GB of RAM, multiple drives, and a GPU or even two in a single ATX PC case.

If you need a full server rack, you're an extreme outlier beyond even 99% of homelab creators.

What? That's the most ridiculous argument I have seen to justify not have a homeserver. Even in the smallest places, it should not be that hard to fit a few low-powered and high perf min PCs and few SBCs. It's all about how badly do you need that control and freedom

You're right! Having a VPS or similar offsite server is also totally self-hosting! Just for the sake of narrative and suburbia analogy, I chose to leave this detail out. Like you mentioned, practically they're mostly the same thing and come with the same pros and cons no matter where the server is. Thanks for your comment!