I was installing Nextcloud and following a YouTube guide and the guy sets up his instance on linode. I just cannot wrap my head around this. Why would anyone pay that kind of money for such weak hardware? He’s paying $20 a month to self host his own cloud and only gets 2 CPUs, 4GB ram and 80GB storage! That’s totally bonkers to me! Does he also pay $50 for a slice of bread? And for what? To host his own cloud? iCloud 200GB is $10 a month lmao. So please, someone explain this to me Barney style why people are doing this instead of building their own. The only advantage is that is is probably far more reliable than hosting your own at home. Or maybe I am completely missing something or maybe I have a fundamental failure in my understanding
It’s much cheaper than equivalent hardware at home- redundant hardware, hot spares, redundant power, UPSes and generators, etc. And good network access with really good peering arrangements- something residential ISPs can’t offer.
That said, do most people need all that? No.
It’s just like AWS. AWS makes sense for a narrow swath of businesses - businesses that can’t afford the capex to run their own data centers and have needs more advanced than less expensive services. Any company over a certain size isn’t going to pay the 10x premium for AWS over their own data centers and infrastructure. But for small businesses with advanced needs it’s the only way to afford things.