5 ms·

Perhaps you don't remember the days when every computer on the internet was an equal peer. To be honest, I don't quite remember it either; I only caught the ver

Perhaps you don't remember the days when every computer on the internet was an equal peer. To be honest, I don't quite remember it either; I only caught the very tail end. But time was you could run a website off your home computer, or your own email server. Now you have to go pay money and hand over trust to one of the huge hosting providers, and the internet is a sort-of-bipartite graph with two classes of citizens: The home clients, and the corporate servers.

Uh7seidu 8y ago
Even multiplayer games were played by directly connecting to game servers that could be operated by anyone, no company-hosted clouds that will shut down after a few years.
beaconstudios 8y ago
> But time was you could run a website off your home computer, or your own email server. Now you have to go pay money and hand over trust to one of the huge hosting providers You still can, and you really don't have to host with a big provider if you don't want to. The only reason we hear about it so much is because all the engineering articles come from people who work at companies with insanely high scaling requirements. If you want to throw up an XAMPP server at home you still can, though you'll need to acquire either a static IP or a dynamic DNS record to point people to.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  > though you'll need to acquire either a static IP or a dynamic DNS record That's the whole point. With some ISPs using CG-NAT, you don't have a public IP. I have three computers at home running an SSH server. Two have to be on non-default ports, since I only have one IP.
- phyzome 8y ago
  And in fact I run a Jabber server off my home IP. But if my ISP catches me at it, they could point to the line in their contract saying "no servers" and demand that I turn it off. (Or just block it outright.) They probably won't, but still.

5 ms·

Perhaps you don't remember the days when every computer on the internet was an equal peer. To be honest, I don't quite remember it either; I only caught the ver

by phyzome 8y ago

Uh7seidu 8y ago
Even multiplayer games were played by directly connecting to game servers that could be operated by anyone, no company-hosted clouds that will shut down after a few years.
beaconstudios 8y ago
> But time was you could run a website off your home computer, or your own email server. Now you have to go pay money and hand over trust to one of the huge hosting providers You still can, and you really don't have to host with a big provider if you don't want to. The only reason we hear about it so much is because all the engineering articles come from people who work at companies with insanely high scaling requirements. If you want to throw up an XAMPP server at home you still can, though you'll need to acquire either a static IP or a dynamic DNS record to point people to.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  > though you'll need to acquire either a static IP or a dynamic DNS record That's the whole point. With some ISPs using CG-NAT, you don't have a public IP. I have three computers at home running an SSH server. Two have to be on non-default ports, since I only have one IP.
- phyzome 8y ago
  And in fact I run a Jabber server off my home IP. But if my ISP catches me at it, they could point to the line in their contract saying "no servers" and demand that I turn it off. (Or just block it outright.) They probably won't, but still.