Comment by drusenko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drusenko | Hacker News Reader

Here are a few issues that come to mind:

- Nobody wants to be a sysadmin. Being a sysadmin sucks, and taking care of servers is hard. Sure, your content may disappear if the startup goes offline, but it will disappear if you have a hard drive crash, are hacked, lose power, or any of the million other issues that can happen.

- People have come to expect fairly good reliability. Having everyone host their own content will be a big step backwards in this regard. Dave's picture? They've been inaccessible for a week... Guess I can't check them out.

- Most broadband connections in the US are not symmetrical in bandwidth: They have much more download than upload bandwidth. That means that most connections do not have enough bandwidth to serve even a moderately popular image, let alone a popular video.

- Last but not least, the vast, vast majority of people are not even close to technical enough to take even the most basic steps involved. For this vision to become reality, the process would need to get much, much easier.

In the long run, I think that people might be better off with some sort of customized hosting plan that has the following things:

- Some sort of social-networking software that uses some sort of (xml?) standard protocol to communicate with others' instances of the software. Basically everyone runs their own Facebook profile page/wall and comments/posts are pushed between instances.

- some sort of OpenID-ish thing that integrates PGP/GPG keys for improved security

- ready to go software for running automated backups from the user's home computer (this could easily support all OSes)

If this was some sort of 'cloud server' or shared hosting plan that cost users maybe $10 or so it could work out pretty well. Though I'm not sure how the existence of current 'free' options would affect things. But I feel that such an option would be the best option for people in the long run. They would retain their own backups of their data, so it's not locked away on some company's server where they can't extract it (and the company will say 'tough luck' if all your data is lost).

I think you forgot one of the most important aspects: personal media hosting, being able to watch your movies or listen to your music from anywhere in the world.

I'm not sure that's something that most home connections could handle (at least not video, or high-quality video). And I doubt that someone would be willing to setup hosting for you for $10/month that allows you to stream your music/movies/tv shows to you over the internet.

For this vision to become reality, the process would need to get much, much easier.

I think that's the whole point.

The services provided by Flickr and Facebook used to be quite a bit more difficult to achieve, too.

Hello Drusneko, re: "Sure, your content may disappear if the startup goes offline" good point. I mirror my Google Docs (in case Google goes belly up :-) and online pictures.

For "personal servers", S3 is very cheap for backing up information (static web pages, data stores), and a once a week or once a month cron job does the trick. Anyway, good point on backups.

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