I don't think programmers and sysadmins get how much there is to learn and how intimidating it is for normal people to host their own software.

For one most of us don't have a computer that is running 24/7, which means we need to rent a server which we have no idea how to go about doing.

And then there's an entire arcane art to running software that can speak to the internet without your server being taken over and used to send spam to half the planet

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in reply to Canageek

thanks this is uplifting. I have been coding and setting up all sorts of servers for decades. One forgets that it is something one had to learn just because it was out of curiosity and for the love of it.

There probably are quite a few people trying to make a business in that niche though. I suspect they are hard to find with margins too small to afford much ad-spend.

So for me it would be a question of how to find customers.

in reply to Hans

@hc I think a community maintained index would be excellent for that sort of thing, or something similar to what TeamSpeak has where they've got a map of all the TeamSpeak hosting companies and you can just click on the city and find who as a server in that city.

TeamSpeak's map is very out of date, but I was still able to find and pay for a hosting provider with it

@Hans
in reply to Canageek

@Canageek I think the service that comes the closest to this is yunohost, though I've had a look at them and I don't know that they're quite to the level you describe.

Also, even if someone does pull this off, they need to have competitors and the ability to easily transfer from one to another, otherwise the enshittification process is almost guaranteed to set in eventually.

I'd love to set something like this up myself, but while I have the time and expertise, I don't have the necessary capital.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@me Also, this is really common in game server hosting, when I was buying a teamspeak host all you had to do was fill out what name you wanted it to have and your credit card details and poof. you had a fully set up TeamSpeak server, and they had similar services for dozens of game servers like Minecraft and Call of Duty. Even some open source options like Mumble.
in reply to Canageek

I quite agree with what you say. I'm a retired developer and I've written and run various internet services professionally - and I'm aware of gaps in my networking knowledge.
I've set up self hosted services in the past based on my own software (using things like nginx and various databases as components) but I'd hesitate to do it now because of the increased prevalence of scrapers and deliberate attackers.
I would really hesitate to recommend self hosting for normal people.

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