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)
The “port forwading” thing is probably the biggest challenge. There is no “single tutorial” on how to do port forwarding. Some routers don’t even have a setting for it. And most people probably don’t have a public static IP, and I’ve seen provider fees that are so high that it’s cheaper to get a VPS instead.
And additionally, even if you manage the port forwarding, it is still some additional risk to host a public service on your own personal LAN.
Yeah it’s a whole different subject to learn too. I build my own PC’s use linux but still don’t know what port forwarding is, what’s a VPS? What is NAT, NAS, what are the best programs to use for ad-blocking, streaming, how do they work. It feels endless the shit I need to research before even beginning! 😄 I’m tech savvy but feel like a total noob with self hosting - I got no idea!
Personally, port forwarding was pretty low on the list. Also, what happened to portfoward.com? It was invaluable to me back in the day but is jammed with ads now (at least on mobile). Once you figure it out for your particular router it’s pretty much done. Also, if a provider charges you enough for a static IP to host a VPS, you need a new ISP. Unless VPS’ are cheaper than I expected?
For me when I first started it was VLANs (former ISP had one, “bricked” a router trying to make it work before I knew what I was doing), subnetting and getting shit like mariaDB to work/docker in general.
My ISP offers static IPs only on business plans that cost quite a lot more than the consumer rates. Difference is probably ~20€ per month. Plus I need the hardware and energy cost.
My VPS costs 10€ per month.
Man you too huh? I didn’t realise how lucky we were ISP wise, guess my country had to have some things going for it.