Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

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It's better because the internet was supposed to be a bunch of computers talking to each other. It was a beautiful vision. Instead, it's been centralized on two levels:

FB/Google/Instagram etc. serving content, and AWS/DigitalOcean owning the hardware for those intrepid individuals who want to roll their own solutions.

The internet wasn't supposed to be Amazon, Google, and Facebook all talking to each other. It's scary that ISP's don't even want you to host your own (modest) server. It's SUPPOSED to be a bunch of computers networked together! Sandstorm makes it easier to live that vision where you own the hardware, or at LEAST have full control over your cloud. It doesn't necessarily need to be your home computer - a colo'ed odroid (or RPi if your needs are modest) would do the trick too. As more and more of the internet is gobbled up by VPS services I think it's important that the average Jane or Joe can still put together their own website, blog, game server, etc. and not be reliant on a company for it.

Unfortunately, I don't see how this solves the problem. The main problem for me is this part of my ISP's ToS: "Users may not run any type of server on the system."

Further, every ISP I've ever had has had some such clause. I'd have to get a business plan to actually be allowed to run a server. So who is this, or any home server software, even for?

(Or at least, who in the US)

Sandstorm is not necessarily about running the server at home (though you can). It's more about being able to choose what is on your server and control how your data is stored and accessed, whether on a home machine or running in a datacenter.

I think I can use apt-get/rpm/etc to control what's on my server already these days?

Sure, but only if all of the following are true:

1) You understand how to use the Unix shell and everything else that goes into maintaining a Unix machine.

2) You have the time to do it. (This is what has always stopped me, FWIW.)

3) You are willing to spend money on a machine that has sufficient resources to be responsive when you use it but sits idle 99% of the time since you're the only user.

These obstacles are what drive people to SaaS, where they no longer have freedom to install arbitrary software.

Unfortunately we lost all of the small independent ISP's that offered any semblance of competition. I just host my own stuff anyway with an ISP known to be pretty relaxed about it. You're right, though, it's a major problem.

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