Usually, I’d aim for the cloud environments for public resources (serving more than like 20 people), as the traffic won’t be hitting your home network.
Additionally, selfhosting a public service like Lemmy on your home environment probably wouldn’t have the same uptime or reliability, as I only have one strong ISP signal, and no backup generator.
However, pricing wise, selfhosting at home is much cheaper for the processing power you get.
I have a VPS subscription, which I use as a reverse proxy. Most of my services are on a headless computer in my bedroom. The two are connected with wireguard. (I also connect some SBC’s to the VPS to host some other services)
Works perfectly, haven’t had any connection issue or downtime expect when I manually reboot or service the case.
Currently:
22:26:03 up 230 days
I would and do. I have gig fiber which is more than enough for both my home and web service uses. The level of hardware I can bring to bear is far beyond what I could afford in a DC. Sure there are sometimes internet or power problems that you don’t usually get in a DC but they are rare and are made up for by me having physical access to my servers when something goes wrong.
Plus it’s fun.
No, definitely not. I don’t want my home network to be in any way accessible to the public. No matter how secure you think your network is.
I do, though I run a reverse-proxy (homelab dials out to the proxy, ala cloudflare tunnels, no need for home IP to even be in DNS) using frp in a cloud provider. Hosting critical (to me) things in my lab is just motivation to keep it in good shape.
You are certainly right on cost. I could have bought a (used) server a year for the price of my cloud footprint at peak, though my power bill would probably end up out of control.
If I did, I would put it behind something like Cloudflare. I do host a number of lower-traffic WordPress sites from home (<1k hits month). Oddly enough I actually do have backup power so reliability is pretty good.
I would not host anything bandwidth-heavy.
For backup power, you got like a generator for the server, or the whole building?
Whole-house generator. Nat gas fueled 22kw. My server rack has enough battery power to allow the generator to kick in (auto transfer switch).
It wasn’t a choice purely for the servers though. I work 100% from home and my wife about 25% and we don’t have overly reliable power so it had a lot to do with that too. I can operate just like normal even during an extended power outage.
I also run a reverse proxy using a cheap VPS. At home I have several vlans some of which are dedicated for self hosting and exposed to the reverse proxy.
I use Caddy for the proxy and wireguard to join my VPS and home network vlans.
My home IP can never be exposed and the VPS provider only sees the wireguard traffic.