Comment by progval

> I host my data in the cloud because I don't want to pay the energy bill of the equipment at home.

Then you pay someone else's energy bill.

> Despite not having concrete facts I believe it is more environmental friendly if we started hosting servers centralised in facilities instead of everyone doing at in their homes.

It's true that running 1000 instances of a software on the same big computer consumes less than running them on 1000 different computers, because they won't use all its resources at the same time. There's also less overhead if you can share their computations.

However, hosting everything at the same place has some environmental issues too. A datacenter needs cooling, and not all homes do. If there's a lot of data traffic between you and the software, that traffic needs to go through the internet instead of being local.

I'm not saying one way is better than the other; it probably depends on the kind of software we're talking about.