Without a doubt a lot do, but I personally couldn’t care less. I have a server at home, but that’s just a necessary evil. If I could I’d just rent hardware for everything, but there’s technical and obviously financial limitations with that.
And hosting pretty much anything is practically identical regardless of the platform. Sure, there’s exceptions, like my Home Assistant server with z-wave, which needs to be physically nearby my other stuff, but things like fediverse instances and other browser-based stuff are exactly the same to maintain regardless of the underlying platform.
my Home Assistant server with z-wave, which needs to be physically nearby my other stuff
Not sure about Z-wave, but with Zigbee it’s possible to get coordinators with Ethernet ports (and this is generally recommended over USB ones due to the added flexibility), so your Home Assistant server doesn’t actually have to be near your Zigbee network, just the coordinator does.
Well, sure, I could leave just the z-wave endpoint at home and move the server to the cloud, but that would mean that none of my automations would work if the network happens to be down. And my ISP is pretty damn good to keep me on line, but that’s one thing of my home automation I’m not willing to compromise. Everything has to be local and not dependent on any kind of connectivity to outside.
Sure, the things rely on the infrastructure (networking very much included) I have in place in my house and it’s not perfect by any stretch and my HA server in itself would most likely be ‘safer’ in the cloud, but it still is my home automation and I want to keep it local to avoid connectivity issues, latency and other stuff beyond my control.
And sure, should my server PSU die tomorrow, it would bring the whole system down. As I mentioned, the setup is far from perfect, but it’s built the way I like it and, for me, this is the best approach. You may weigh pros/cons differently, and that’s perfectly fine. I have my reasons and you have yours, both equally valid.
But I’d still rather not mess with hardware, I just need at least one physical server and other stuff around to keep things running the way I like them.
Even on the same network, I like having a Zigbee coordinator with an Ethernet port. I put it in a more central location in my house, which helped improve the network quality.
@[email protected], I self host my media server, my *aars, my Usenet client, Home Assistant, dns server, and have some loud af r710s for standing up test AD and simulated network environments. My website is hosted on Google Cloud, moved from AWS bc free tier ran out and g cloud is like $0.42 a month. It’s just whatever makes sense for the thing being hosted.
I should look into AWS as well. Currently using a refurbished Datto NAS, running debian with everything in docker. I also have a r710! But I don’t have room for it at the moment.
AWS is very expensive compared to regular VPS services, and you only really get a benefit from it if you use a lot of different AWS services in a multiple regions. One EC2 instance in one region doesn’t really have advantages over a regular VPS.
If you do want to use AWS, consider using Lightsail. It’s like a regular VPS and has a fixed monthly price for some amount of disk space, CPU, and monthly transfer, father than being dynamically priced.
Without a doubt a lot do, but I personally couldn’t care less. I have a server at home, but that’s just a necessary evil. If I could I’d just rent hardware for everything, but there’s technical and obviously financial limitations with that.
And hosting pretty much anything is practically identical regardless of the platform. Sure, there’s exceptions, like my Home Assistant server with z-wave, which needs to be physically nearby my other stuff, but things like fediverse instances and other browser-based stuff are exactly the same to maintain regardless of the underlying platform.
Not sure about Z-wave, but with Zigbee it’s possible to get coordinators with Ethernet ports (and this is generally recommended over USB ones due to the added flexibility), so your Home Assistant server doesn’t actually have to be near your Zigbee network, just the coordinator does.
Well, sure, I could leave just the z-wave endpoint at home and move the server to the cloud, but that would mean that none of my automations would work if the network happens to be down. And my ISP is pretty damn good to keep me on line, but that’s one thing of my home automation I’m not willing to compromise. Everything has to be local and not dependent on any kind of connectivity to outside.
Sure, the things rely on the infrastructure (networking very much included) I have in place in my house and it’s not perfect by any stretch and my HA server in itself would most likely be ‘safer’ in the cloud, but it still is my home automation and I want to keep it local to avoid connectivity issues, latency and other stuff beyond my control.
And sure, should my server PSU die tomorrow, it would bring the whole system down. As I mentioned, the setup is far from perfect, but it’s built the way I like it and, for me, this is the best approach. You may weigh pros/cons differently, and that’s perfectly fine. I have my reasons and you have yours, both equally valid.
But I’d still rather not mess with hardware, I just need at least one physical server and other stuff around to keep things running the way I like them.
I agree with you :)
Even on the same network, I like having a Zigbee coordinator with an Ethernet port. I put it in a more central location in my house, which helped improve the network quality.
Exactly this.
@[email protected], I self host my media server, my *aars, my Usenet client, Home Assistant, dns server, and have some loud af r710s for standing up test AD and simulated network environments. My website is hosted on Google Cloud, moved from AWS bc free tier ran out and g cloud is like $0.42 a month. It’s just whatever makes sense for the thing being hosted.
I should look into AWS as well. Currently using a refurbished Datto NAS, running debian with everything in docker. I also have a r710! But I don’t have room for it at the moment.
AWS is very expensive compared to regular VPS services, and you only really get a benefit from it if you use a lot of different AWS services in a multiple regions. One EC2 instance in one region doesn’t really have advantages over a regular VPS.
If you do want to use AWS, consider using Lightsail. It’s like a regular VPS and has a fixed monthly price for some amount of disk space, CPU, and monthly transfer, father than being dynamically priced.