Also known as: Home server, Self-hosting
A home server is a computer you run at home to host services for yourself — file storage (a NAS), a personal site, or media you stream around the house.1
Overview
Self-hosting means running those services on hardware you own instead of paying a provider. The appeal is control and privacy; the costs nobody mentions up front are electricity, keeping the box online 24/7, and a real backup plan. To reach it from outside your house you typically set up port forwarding on your router so requests find the server.
Where it fits
A Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer — or an old PC gathering dust — makes a great first server: cheap, low-power, and enough for file shares and small sites. In GopherTrunk terms a home machine can do both jobs at once: capture RF from an attached dongle and store and serve the decoded data, which a remote VPS cannot.
Sources
-
Self-hosting (web services) — Wikipedia, on running services on hardware you own. ↩