Your first paragraph is absolutely correct. The issue I see with your solution is that there's no fault tolerance, so the service is likely to be unreliable, an

Your first paragraph is absolutely correct. The issue I see with your solution is that there's no fault tolerance, so the service is likely to be unreliable, and then of course there's dynamic IP which means it will be difficult to connect to from the public internet. Honestly, the real issue is getting people to pay for things. Running web services has a cost, but it's hard to "see" it. If you're mom is going to want that server to be available 24/7, then she has to pay for a computer to run it on and an internet connection (which she has probably already done) as well as the electricity to keep it all powered on 24/7, and that doesn't add any fault tolerance to the system. If you can convince her that all that cost it worth it to stream music, then why can't you convince her spend a similar amount to let someone else deal with the hassle and get better reliability? The best solution is to simply pay a service to do the hosting and take advantage of economies of scale to provide an always-on service at a great value. "free" services that aren't actually free are the problem.