Stuffing it into your basement, which is the "build your own data center" option, isn't prohibitively expensive, not does the hardware have to be. There's a gulf of prices between a Raspberry Pi and a new Dell or HP server. On top of that, getting 5 nines of uptime is costly, but we're not trying to self host Google.com here. If my personal file server goes down, my friends'll eventually notice but we're talking about a service that gets 0 rps (requests per second) when all of us are all sleeping, so no
nines is sufficient. More would be great, but like you said, it's expensive.
If you're interested in tech or gaming, you usually accumulate hardware anyways - putting the old stuff to use just makes sense in most cases.
And I actually don't really agree with the article - My issue with SaaS products is not privacy. My problems are quality and consistency. My self-hosted stuff doesn't auto-update to a version that's less capable or dumb itself down to shove users into advertising flows or "new" features they want me to use. 7
It's not about privacy - it's about having the computer serve me. It's the difference between a free "financial advisor" peddling scams vs a paid agent with fiduciary duty.
My SLA is only to myself, so it’s not so bad. That said I do host some “critical” services like my password manager, and so making a mistake that takes those down can be a pain. I figure on balance it has been worth it.
just FYI, I've been running a few services on a Hetzner VM and a few others in a box at home. With an 5 minute uptime ping (uptime robot) I am consistently getting a 3 to 4 nines uptime for the home server and that can be substantially improved if I care to put an UPS (my old one failed). As others pointed out, home ISP is often not great for self hosting due to things such as asymmetric transfer speed, periods of higher latency and short, but sometimes frequent outages.
