Comment by nine_k
1 day ago
This is very right. There are two obstacles.
(1) Security. An always-on, externally accessible device will always be a target for breaking in. You want the device to be bulletproof, and to have defense in depth, so that breaking into one service does not affect anything else. Something like Proxmox that works on low-end hardware and is as easy to administer as a mobile phone would do. We are somehow far from this yet. A very limited thing like a static site may be made both easy and bulletproof though.
(2) Connectivity providers should allow that. Most home routers don't get a static IP, or even a globally routable IPv4 at all. Or even a stable IPv6. This complicates the DNS setup, and without DNS such resources are basically invisible.
From the pure resilience POV, it seems more important to keep control of your domain, and have an automated way to deploy your site / app on whatever new host, which is regularly tested. Then use free or cheap DNS and VM hosting of convenience. It takes some technical chops, but can likely be simplified and made relatively error-proof with a concerted effort.
This is being solved with https://geogram.radio
Every phone/device is their own server, they connect with a web socket to the preferred station which is typically a server online serving as bridge.
There is no need to be always connected to a server, you can also connect locally on the WiFi, BLE or even USB-C cables (discovery is automatic).
From there are internal apps for sharing static websites, chat, blogs, files and so forth.
> Connectivity providers should allow that. Most home routers don't get a static IP, or even a globally routable IPv4 at all. Or even a stable IPv6.
At least we still have DDNS which solves the static IP problem. I've been using it for at least 10-15 years and my home network has always been resolvable over DNS. I guess I'm lucky that I've always had an ISP that handed out publicly routable IPv4 addresses. I think if I joined an ISP where I got some internal node on the ISP's 10.x.x.x network, I'd immediately cancel my service.
IPv6-only ISPs exist; one of them is T-Mobile. I used it as my main ISP for several months, and it worked pretty well.
Both or those are solved by having a tunnel and a cache that is hosted in the cloud. Something like tailscale or cloudflare provides this pretty much out of the box, but wireguard + nginx on a cheap VPS would accomplish much the same if you are serious about avoiding the big guys.
If you already pay for a cheap VPS, why not host the whole thing there? It's the simple Web. (As has been noted in comments elsewhere.)