Well, while both option exists and obviously anyone is (almost) free to choose, I still fail to see convenience in living on someone else computer. Anyway, allo

Well, while both option exists and obviously anyone is (almost) free to choose, I still fail to see convenience in living on someone else computer. Anyway, allow me a different scenario: you are Foo Bar, you have a bunch of documents and many photos/videos/music etc no computer skills beyond clicking around. You ask someone more knowledgeable, local or remote, but still a single human, if he/she can create your infra to own your data. he/she gives you a list of stuff to buy, instructions to assemble or came to you/send it assembled and ready to you, a usb stick with a live system to deploym the config (NixOS/Guix system) on it. You are now operational, your infra it's still a black box for you but you own the config, so you can give it to someone and in case of trouble or the need of changes you know who to contact. You pay a certain capex and small opex. Your infra evolve following you. Your contact disappear, another came and propose to rebuild anything, no data loss, he/she can use your iron, your data and knowing anything from the config. You are on again and the event loop keep running. How different is from choosing let's say FileHoster inc who works well enough, albeit much less than your infra, and have no capex, than it experience a big issue (cfr. Gandi/FR two times few years ago) all your data are lost, you still have some here and there you get up again on another one, than it became too expensive, you switch from another, ... In the two scenario: - on one side you spent in capex more than in opex, so you spent at a specific point in time, in an inflationary economy, instead of being vampirized every month; - you are tied to your infra reliability and consumer grade assembled iron it's pretty reliable for such usage, as most well know giants are for the same usage/point of view BUT on one side the reliability is in your infra, something you can tune, learn and check, on the other it's about third party decisions who can happen at every point in time without anything you can do. You've certainly read countless of time about $BigName impromptu ban for instance. You've certainly experienced terms of use unilateral changes, sometimes ok for you sometimes not. Where is the balance? If you live in a Korean goshiwon -alike you can't host while you might still have docs/photos etc you have no choice, but when you have it and honestly MOST people who need IT at a certain level do have the choice, at least formally, if he/she knows it exists, then where is the convenience? Trusting the market on one side, with little to no capex but much bigger opex and uncertainty or more capex, less opex and uncertainty? Think about schooling: what we do in most part of the world? A big initial capex (long school time) than profiting for life on the acquired knowledge or a jump in the wild than we will learn on the go? In the mean people are honest, so trusting someone else IF you can verify or the exposure it's low it will generally end up well anyway, otherwise... I trust myself more than someone else shielded under a corp name, eventually in another country (so legal protection issues, geopolitical risks and so on)...