Oh, boy. A DSL line isn't sufficient to handle 150 people accessing the site right now. It may be slow, but it's not going to go down. It's powered by Node, the nodejs process is only using 56MB of RAM and about 40% CPU. I'm fine. My bandwidth is simply depleted. Have patience, and thank you for visiting. I need some bandwidth and a budget. Wow.
I'll never understand this when a $5 digital ocean VPS could perform far better, and probably a lot cheaper than the extra electricity he's burning at home.
According to a document published by the government where Rob lives [1], electricity rates are around 0.08 USD/kWh. We can assume Rob uses a computer at home anyway, and would have his DSL modem on anyway, so the extra electricity should be computed based on a single desktop being on for the extra hours per day that it might otherwise be put to sleep. Typical power consumption for a desktop box is around 90W if it is somewhat active vs. sleeping. There are about 730 hours in a month, but his computer would be on say 30% of the time anyway, so that's 511 extra hours per month. That comes to 46 kWh per month of extra electricity, which in his area costs about 3.68 USD per month.
So the price is slightly less, but the value for money isn't good with the home solution. Then again, unemployed people are sometimes known to make suboptimal economic decisions in terms of expected value, because they're optimizing for other things (e.g. being able to switch off a cost mid-month).
Because hosting it yourself is so much nicer and you learn so much more from it. It's not nicer in terms of connection speed (although unlimited bandwidth counters that a bit), but you just have everything under control. You can do and put anything on the server while being assured there is no BOFH nosing in your data, or someone social engineering the support team. I would not feel entirely safe storing private keys on a VPS.
I agree that from a business perspective, a VPS is the obvious winner. You don't get redundant hardware and fast internet at home for the same price as you can with a VPS. And if something goes down, you needn't be the one on call: your host fixes it all for you. But for personal hosting that doesn't need someone on call, I prefer hosting my own stuff.
And, especially on DSL internet, it's much nicer to have your data and backups in the LAN instead of having to up/download it all through that pipe. So if you have a server at home anyway, no need to get another VPS really.
Oh, boy. A DSL line isn't sufficient to handle 150 people accessing the site right now. It may be slow, but it's not going to go down. It's powered by Node, the nodejs process is only using 56MB of RAM and about 40% CPU. I'm fine. My bandwidth is simply depleted. Have patience, and thank you for visiting. I need some bandwidth and a budget. Wow.