Entirely disagree with you here: -Nowhere was it insisted that all servers are equal. -Most people would prefer a hosted solution to hosting one locally(not c

Entirely disagree with you here: -Nowhere was it insisted that all servers are equal. -Most people would prefer a hosted solution to hosting one locally(not constantly using their local machines resources) -For many apps the performance and uptime of a server is of enough importance that this simply wouldn't work. -A hosted solution provides a stable controlled and relatively unchanging environment, depending on what else you use that box for. -Unless there's guaranteed uptime(which there isn't in this case) you have even more merging headaches. (read 4 slave-peers(not really even 'peers' in this context) all have different diffs after a week of the master being offline) -Putting an app on a box somewhere isn't a 'massive scale solution'. >If you want to have a reliable server instead of just a server, then you want more than one server. No. Not for a personal or small app you don't. You can have 'reliable hosting' (say one of the many VM providers backed by solid hardware and a RAID tolerant to multiple drive failures). Reliable doesn't mean completely immune to failure, and you're underestimating the reliability if you think this is a regular occurrence. Your average hosting provider offers orders of magnitude more reliability than any users local PC or mobile(even if we're talking a constantly online desktop with wired ethernet). It's just a ridiculously complicated thing your asking for here while simultaneously dismissing the parent comment as 'hiding the problem behind an abstraction'.