

Maybe it's time for personal servers? - genieyclo
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/11/15/maybeItsTimeForPersonalSer.html

======
drusenko
Here are a few issues that come to mind:

\- Nobody wants to be a sysadmin. Being a sysadmin sucks, and taking care of
servers is hard. Sure, your content _may_ disappear if the startup goes
offline, but it _will_ disappear if you have a hard drive crash, are hacked,
lose power, or any of the million other issues that can happen.

\- People have come to expect fairly good reliability. Having everyone host
their own content will be a big step backwards in this regard. Dave's picture?
They've been inaccessible for a week... Guess I can't check them out.

\- Most broadband connections in the US are not symmetrical in bandwidth: They
have much more download than upload bandwidth. That means that most
connections do not have enough bandwidth to serve even a moderately popular
image, let alone a popular video.

\- Last but not least, the vast, vast majority of people are not even close to
technical enough to take even the most basic steps involved. For this vision
to become reality, the process would need to get much, much easier.

~~~
pyre
In the long run, I think that people might be better off with some sort of
customized hosting plan that has the following things:

\- Some sort of social-networking software that uses some sort of (xml?)
standard protocol to communicate with others' instances of the software.
Basically everyone runs their own Facebook profile page/wall and
comments/posts are pushed between instances.

\- some sort of OpenID-ish thing that integrates PGP/GPG keys for improved
security

\- ready to go software for running automated backups from the user's home
computer (this could easily support all OSes)

If this was some sort of 'cloud server' or shared hosting plan that cost users
maybe $10 or so it could work out pretty well. Though I'm not sure how the
existence of current 'free' options would affect things. But I feel that such
an option would be the _best_ option for people in the long run. They would
retain their own backups of their data, so it's not locked away on some
company's server where they can't extract it (and the company will say 'tough
luck' if all your data is lost).

~~~
sil3ntmac
I think you forgot one of the most important aspects: personal media hosting,
being able to watch your movies or listen to your music from anywhere in the
world.

~~~
pyre
I'm not sure that's something that most home connections could handle (at
least not video, or high-quality video). And I doubt that someone would be
willing to setup hosting for you for $10/month that allows you to stream your
music/movies/tv shows to you over the internet.

------
carbon8
Getting a vps for $8-$20/mo from linode, slicehost, prgmr, webbynode,
rackspace cloud or any other vps provider is so much easier than dealing with
a machine at your home.

~~~
Wilfred
Still, at $20/month I use a small $100 plug computer (such as
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug>) as a home server instead. Your use
case may be different to mine but that is more than I'm willing to pay within
a student budget.

~~~
manvsmachine
How about $25 per _year_?

<http://www.asmallorange.com/hosting/shared/>

~~~
cmelbye
That's yet another overselling shared host running cPanel. Pretty much the
stark opposite of what this article is talking about.

~~~
manvsmachine
Oh, I'm not in any way suggesting that this is what the article is talking
about. I'm specifically curious about how cheap shared hosting delivers (or
fails to deliver) in a price / performance comparison to one of those "plug on
the wall" servers. Not trying to be snarky here; I'm actually hoping for a
legitimate response, as I have no experience with them (but they sound kind of
interesting).

------
mark_l_watson
I think that most developers have a "personal server" (or two!)

I keep MongoDB, CouchDB, Sesame, PostgreSQL+PostGIS, etc. "always on" for my
personal and research projects - keeping my stuff separate and using
customer's VPSs or EC2 instances, etc. for their work.

Would I want to have all of this stuff running all the time on my laptop? I
don't think so.

I used to keep at least one server running on our home network but now I
mostly use a really cheap VPS, and a small "3 year pay in advance" EC2
instance. Running a server or two in my house is something that I only do for
special needs.

Anyway, I live with the network latency hit for the convenience of (usually)
not having to run servers in my home.

~~~
diN0bot
i don't, other than my linode virtual servers (i definitely have a non-work
personal one for experiementing with).

i consider myself a developer along the lines of programmer and maker, even
software engineer at times. i love extensible code. i love making things that
work, are useful and have code that i can be proud.

code is TOTALLY different than configuration files and installing things. i
only do system administration because i have to, and even then i consider it
the worst "waste" of time (it's not actually a waste because yeah, it's nice
to have a webserver and cron jobs, etc).

i'd much rather be writing documentation or even better, designing and
diagramming how some neat pieces of code are going to work together.

i feel like people who figured out how to make allen wrenches keeping thinking
it'd be cool if everyone else made allen wrenches. i just want to make bikes,
including choppers and tall bikes and elegant fixies. other people just want
to ride bikes, and that suits me fine because maybe i can sell my bikes to
them, just as i don't mind buying allen wrenches.

maybe we each of us have a maker inside, but luckily we don't all want to make
the same things. don't fight the business model.

------
ShabbyDoo
A few weeks ago, I searched a bit for "appliances" that would run on
GoogleApps and found basically nothing. One would think that, given 5M free
pageview/month, there would be much interest in semi-private forums, poor-
man's http proxy (to circumvent The Man) and the like.

My wife participates on a semi-private forum of mommies, and it concerns me
that none of them have strong control over the data they generate.

~~~
cmelbye
[http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/search?category...](http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/search?categoryId=1&orderBy=rating)

There's some pretty good stuff in there, and it's dead simple to enable if
you're using Google Apps for your domain.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
I realized after it was too late to edit that I typed "Google Apps" instead of
"App Engine." However, I'll check out the Google Apps add-ons as well given
that my wife and I are now a "company" and share Google calendars on our
Android phones.

------
jlees
I had to double check this was written in 2009. In the last four years I've
moved _away_ from having a personal server at home to The Cloud(TM), and life
is much, much easier. There's certainly a class of people for whom a personal
server at home is a great idea, but I don't think it's the tech-savvy
mainstream in the long run.

------
jasonlbaptiste
This is a branding and marketing issue and not a tech issue. The word "server"
is scary to the mainstream audience that would adopt it. The tech is there
whether it's windows home server or ubuntu with Samba. Making it easy and how
you market it to the digital home is the real key. More and more media is
being created+consumed in the digital home. A digital home looks something
like a multi-computer household with a wireless network + at least one HDTV.
There's certainly a very big need for this, now more than ever.

~~~
dan_the_welder
My "digital home" uses FreeNAS on a old 400mhz beater box.
<http://www.freenas.org/>

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
FreeNAS is really great, especially for using older spare parts,etc.

~~~
dan_the_welder
I have to give that project some major props. It was the most painless install
I have ever done and it is simple to use.

------
zandorg
I was rambling on about this in 2001. You use Gnutella to search the
'transient web', which is just a bunch of home webservers serving up people's
pages. Gnutella would link them all together and perform searches, as it does
for MP3s now. Note: not searching filenames, but - like Google - a list of
words in a HTML document.

I tried to get Gnucleus (John Marshall's Gnutella project) to incorporate
full-text searches. He said he'd help but my code ended up - disabled - in
Morpheus Preview Edition [itself based on Gnucleus] which was downloaded over
100,000,000 times (!). If anyone can be described as blowing a chance, that
was me with MPE.

Then I tried Limewire, and wrote the code to interface with Lucene (a Java
full text search engine), and they blew me off too.

Since then I've given up, but I did at least get a poster paper at HT03 about
it!

~~~
steveitis
I've thought that kademlia or some other DHT would be the ideal solution to
this.

Think newsgroup/forum style conversational threading, with a separate data
channel for large transfers, and landgrab DNS based on popularity.

------
whatajoke
Doesn't Opera unite fit the bill here?

<http://unite.opera.com/>

~~~
astine
Hell, Apache fits the bill here. I think that the author was more concerned
that more people aren't hosting their own content. Which is a pain, evenw ith
Opera Unite. So, it's no surprise why most services are still based on
corporate servers.

------
bonsaitree
AT ~$20/month why not have both?

One can setup dynamic DNS to map one's physical home server into the cloud.
This gives you all the advantages of a legitimate POP whilst also providing
the security, redundancy, and local audit-ability of your own hardware.

------
daleharvey
I completely agree, however I dont think broadband is going to be good enough
for the next X years for "personal" to mean quite the same thing, not to
mention the issues of backups, power saving and such.

I expect to see something like myopera / couchdb / ubuntu one type system
where your personal machines are mirrored for full uptime, services like
flickr should integrate with these machines instead of actually owning your
content outright. I havent thought about how this would work too much but glad
to see people like couchdb / ubuntu and mozilla try to attack it it

~~~
pyre
> _however I dont think broadband is going to be good enough for the next X
> years for "personal" to mean quite the same thing_

Not to mention that most ISP agreements forbid you from running a home server
unless you upgrade to 'business level.'

~~~
drunkpotato
This is something that really irritates me. Clearly what they mean is that if
you are going to run a commercial server (with the attendant increase in
outgoing traffic), you should buy a business account. But that is not what is
stated in the contract. As it stands, the Verizon FIOS contract disallows
running sshd and logging in to your own computer from outside your home
network. Now, they don't block this, and won't, yet the contract language
disallows such a personal and reasonable use.

I have tried writing to Verizon, politicians, the FCC, and the BBB on this
issue. The only one that bothered to reply is the FCC to say, basically, "not
our problem." I would appreciate any ideas as to who else I can contact to try
to improve Verizon's language.

~~~
wmf
Once network neutrality kicks in we could try to convince the FCC that
prohibiting servers is a form of non-neutral discrimination.

------
korch
Isn't this the exact opposite of our favorite over-hyped buzzword: "The
Cloud"? Instead of accessing all your data via freemium 3rd party hosts, you
keep your own data, and those 3rd parties pubsub to/from your server. I like
this idea since it's an elegant solution to our current web mess of walled
gardens, multiple accounts, vendor lock-in, privacy, and the low quality of
content on the web in general.

But I think we're 10 years away from having this because the hardware just
isn't there yet. The idea will have traction when our cell phones can run as
this "universal personal server". Then it can actually have the mass-scale
adoption required for it to work. But the majority of end-users can barely
operate an OS, they don't even know what the difference is between a browser
and an app, and almost nobody understands what the Internet actually is. From
the common point of view, the Internet might as well represent the highest
achievement of magick rather than science. So until it's as ubiquitous as
having a cell phone, personal servers will remain in the domain of geeks who
will hack up, tweak and preen their own solutions.

It's interesting how the software industry is utterly craptastic at
anticipating how the plummeting cost of better and better hardware changes the
kind of software services which people will use. In short time spans too.
Amazon, Google et. al. have spent billions going long on the bet that 12 years
out, everything will be served from global super-computer clusters distributed
across mega-datacenters around the world. It is interesting to ask if Amazon,
Google and everyone else are about to get blind sided, and not only miss the
boat, but fail to even see it.

------
codemechanic
Run Tonido in your desktop. That will solve this issue.

------
jrockway
In the interest of "truth in advertising", the author should add an "h" to his
last name. His blog makes a lot more sense then.

