Is it just up-front cost? I understand that for larger instances because they’d have to setup heftier systems, but even micro-instances seem to rent cloud compute when they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.
Edit: I understand that self-hosting is a skill that takes years to learn, and I’m aware that the vast majority of people on Earth choose to spend their time and energy investing into completely different topics. However, Lemmy tends to attract the techy type, so I suppose I just assumed the ratio of self-hosters-to-not would be higher. I’m not saying it’s trivial, just that I presume more Lemmings know how to do it than, say, Redditors (taking total users into account ofc)
It’s expensive. Sure you can start off with an old laptop, but soon you’ll want external storage to hold more images/media.
Then you’ll realize that if you just got a dedicated mini-pc you could host more containers. Oh! What if you get multiple identical PCs and then you cluster them for HA/zero downtime maintenance?!
Shit, but then you would need more than the little integrated 4 port switch on your Netgear router.
No matter! Switch to a virtualized pfsense, ditch the Netgear router and go for a 12 port switch.
Smash cut to a few years later when you’re spec’ing fiber switches/SFP+ for 10Gbps and Proxmox nodes with an extra 4GB ram so your ceph cluster doesn’t fall over randomly… Wait, why is my electric bill now $400/mo?
I’ve been seriously considering downgrading my homelab, but at this point between the *arr stack and Immich, I’m not sure if I can.