dan

How much difference does an extra second in the microwave make?

My husband forgets food if it doesn't beep (ADHD).

Same. I get other things done while the food is in the microwave, and would completely forget about it without the beep. Thankfully neither my wife nor I are sensitive to the beeping.

My wife leaves time on the microwave. I like things to be complete though, and time left on the microwave means the usage of it is incomplete.

So I can install any software I want. I'm running my own Lemmy server. I host Odoo and n8n for my wife's business. I have servers running Borgbackup and Borgmatic for backups. And a bunch of other stuff.

It's the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).

I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy's development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.

I've tried that before, but barely anyone donates. People expect the world for free.

I agree about the automated scaling, but with VPS hosting you can usually have several hot spares to handle traffic spikes, and still spend less than something like AWS. Most good VPS hosts will let you create a private network between your VPSes. 1000x spikes aren't very common.

CDNs are pretty easy in general, especially if they support origin pull.

I don't like keeping all my eggs in one basket, so I use a few different providers.

Yes, because a Linux server with root access is much more powerful than a platform like Cloudflare.

There seems to be two groups of people:

People that use services like AWS and pay hundreds (or more) per month: "Wow, hosting is so expensive now!"

People that host a bunch of stuff on a $40/year VPS: "Wow, hosting is so cheap now!"

I've got several VPSes with 40Gbps (shared) networking, 8 or 16GB RAM, decent amount of space on RAIDed enterprise NVMe SSDs, fast AMD EPYC CPUs, that cost less than $60/year. 20 years ago before VPS hosting became popular, you'd need to pay at least $100/month for a dedicated server with a consumer CPU, single IDE hard drive, tiny amount of RAM, on a 100Mb/s connection.

Not to mention being able to host a bunch of stuff at home for cheap with a low-power single-board or mini PC., and Hetzner making dedicated servers very cheap too.

every time I have an idea for some little quality of life tool that involves pulling data from a site I would normally have to browse to directly, I can't do it because everything is captcha'd to all hell.

On the flip side, a bunch of services / web apps (mostly paid ones) are adding APIs to become "AI native"... but you can use those APIs without having to use AI too.

A lot of sites wouldn't exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don't have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn't afford to pay.

The only business models that have really worked online have been:

1. Ad-supported.
2. You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
3. Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.

If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We'd end up with even more consolidation of the market.

Good to know! I haven't been able to try one yet, so I wasn't sure.