Looking to run my own next cloud instance soon.
Perhaps a photography blog, where you don't want to drag the jpg quality down to "looks fine without zooming" levels, might be more of a struggle. Or if your goal is to share flashable images for a raspberry pi or so (that can easily be gigabytes), yeah then this is not going to be a good experience even without concurrent users.
Definitely you'll be fine to host things like:
- a website (blog, CV, hobby, link shortening... can be anything) if you don't overload it with huge CSS/JS bundles
- chat server, such as Matrix or an IRC bouncer
- live editing notepad like etherpad, cryptpad, codimd
- software development stuff, like a unit test server or a git server (maybe not if you're the Linux kernel with gigabytes of history), perhaps a build server depending on the size of the binaries (CLI vs GUI)
- game servers: most real-time games (e.g. shooters) will run fine at low bandwidth if your latency is stable (let alone turn-based games), presuming it's just you and some friends playing, maybe not if you want to provide commercial game hosting services
- backup server if are fine driving home for doing restores, especially if you mostly backup when you're at home anyway
- "client" services like web scraping, e.g. I fetch some game's leaderboards regularly (with permission) and provide statistics for them, and monitor a river for giving me notifications in certain cases, which take negligible amounts of bandwidth
- home automation that needs to talk to third-party services or you want to use outside of the house
Probably there are more uses to be thought of. I can only say to not let your dreams be dreams :D
¹ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24198739/what-bitrate-is...
Setting that up will be a lot more in depth and complicated than leveraging a cloud service provider, so you need to consider the cost benefit analysis for yourself. However, if you want to self host and want the bandwidth, I think it is a route worth considering.
The fact that my desktop pc only has a gigabit card is perfect because I'm naturally throttled against using the entire. Obviously I can do this in my router (dream machine which is also gigabit only though) but it leaves a lot of room for everything else that's hosted at home even during peak utilization on my pc.
Proof: https://www.speedtest.net/result/14437484691.png
I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though.
Some people do smart things and find a page that is heavy for your computer to process and hit it a lot.
Some people decide they don't like your service (or you) and flood you.
I've hosted a Tor exit node and other questionable stuff as a teenager, going from 1mbps upload to 50 mbps today. The site has been on the HN homepage, sometimes get featured on news sites like zdnet (that article gave me clicks for years on end), plus I run a file sharing service where anyone can post literally anything but the links are valid for one day. It has definitely hosted links to phishing and malware in the past (and I combat that when I see it, like replacing the short link with an info page "this was a phishing page" + infos).
In ~15 years, I never noticed anyone trying to take down the site. But your sentiment keeps being echoed in places like r/selfhosted and moves people to put their services behind some traffic inspection service, reducing the decentralized to a few places where all traffic passes through (often with decryption keys made available to them). It's still good to self host even if you do that, but I do feel a bit conflicted about that and wouldn't do it myself.
If it happens, not too much you can do, other than move to real hosting, and let them know upfront, or they'll drop you quick. Note that the first line of DDoS defense at your real hosting is going to be null routing your IP: dropping traffic to that IP, preferably on their upstreams' routers. That's normal and ok, although frustrating for you; doing better has costs.