(Or, Home Servers: What, Why, and How)
There’s a project I’ve been doing in my spare time over the past couple of weeks, and it’s really helped me maintain my sanity in our increasingly insane world. It’s my home server. It lets me and my friends and family live a little more freely, giving us all a bit more control over our online lives. In today’s blog post, I’d like to explain what a home server is and why you (even if you’re not particularly technical) should have one, along with busting a few myths along the way.
What’s a server, anyway?
This is a server. It’s about three and a half inches tall, eighteen inches wide, and 28-ish inches deep. It has more computing power than three or four suburban homes combined, sounds like a jet engine, and has a five-digit US dollar price tag. Most of the Internet is running on machines like this, mounted in special cabinets called “racks” that let you stack upwards of a dozen such machines in one cabinet, then installed in massive datacenters by the thousands.
But here’s the secret: underneath all the pricey hardware, this server is just a computer. A very powerful one, sure, but just a computer nonetheless. There’s nothing fundamentally different about it compared to the computer you’re using to read this right now – even if that computer is a phone.
Any computer can be a server, in fact. All “being a server” means is that a computer is listening for requests from other computers and serving up data when it gets those requests. The reason most of the Internet runs on big, fancy, expensive machines like the one above isn’t because it has to. It’s because the Internet isn’t what it used to be. There are fewer and fewer small, personal things on the Internet… and more giant corporate platforms. And when you’re a giant corporation with millions of users, well. You need the hardware to serve millions of users.
This, too, is a server. It sits on my bookshelf, taking up less space than my copy of The Brothers Karamazov. It makes no sound at all, and costs maybe a dollar or two a month in electricity. I bought it for less than a hundred dollars, and this page you’re reading is running on it. Other things that run on it include cloud storage for my friends and family, an online office suite (like Google Docs) to make that storage useful, and a private streaming service (think Netflix or Spotify) for my collection of music, TV, and movies.
What’s the point of it?
Good question. I don’t like the way most technology these days is headed – and by “these days” I mean since about 2010. For a long time, we had a consensus as a society about how things in general would work. If you wanted something, you’d buy it, and then it would be yours in perpetuity. You’d be able to do with it whatever you pleased, providing you weren’t using it to break a law or hurt someone.
Then Silicon Valley changed all that. Slowly, and then all at once, a new way of thinking came about. A way of thinking that trades “purchase” for “subscribe”, that lets Amazon delete books you bought from the Kindle you bought, without your consent or foreknowledge. A way of thinking where you lose all control of your technological life, and the tech companies don’t even give you a discount for it.
Windows comes with ads now. Your files in whatever cloud service you have, they’re not yours anymore. They can disappear whenever the company running it wants them to, and you’re left in the lurch. The media collection you bought and paid for? Sorry, friendo, you didn’t buy a copy, you bought a license. And if for whatever reason the licensor can’t or doesn’t want to let you access the media, well. You’re in the lurch.
I’m a huge fan of Stargate SG-1. Back in 2019, I was going to shell out the money for DVD copies of the whole series, but luckily for me, MGM decided to set up a streaming platform called Stargate Command, giving me access to the whole Stargate franchise for a paltry $50 a year. What a bargain, compared to the $80 or $100 it would have taken for me to get all ten seasons of SG-1 on DVD! At least, it would be a bargain as long as I didn’t keep paying that $50 for three or four years. Well, as things turned out, the streaming service didn’t last long enough for that math to matter. After about a year, it was just gone, as were my $50. There I was, $50 poorer and still Stargate-less.
The same thing happens all over the place. Microsoft Office isn’t a thing you can just buy once and keep forever anymore, despite Office 2007 or earlier still being sufficient for 90% or more of people who need an office suite. Spotify (and Apple Music) have long displaced just buying a CD for the vast majority of people, despite it costing subscribers more and paying artists less.
But I’m not railing against the mere existence of such services! Don’t get me wrong; I love the fact that I can send people files from across the globe by simply uploading them to the cloud and sharing a link. Having my entire music library at my fingertips from anywhere, anytime, as long as I have an Internet connection? Literally life-changing. What I hate is the fact that these things are used to screw everyone involved over except shareholders.
Luckily, there exists an alternative for people like me, and I hope, like you: a home server.
With my home server, I can stream my music library just as if I were paying for Spotify. I can watch my movie and TV collection as if Stargate Command had never died. I can still send people files from across the globe with a link, and I can still edit documents online with other people, as if I were paying for Google Docs. It’s just that all of those things aren’t happening on someone else’s big, fancy server in a datacenter somewhere in Indiana. They’re happening on my bookshelf, and costing me practically nothing.
That sounds complicated.
I won’t lie and say it’s child’s play. But it’s less of a hassle than you might think. Getting a machine to serve as your server – pun not intended – is as simple as finding an old computer you or a friend isn’t using anymore. If nothing comes to mind, you can find tiny office PCs from manufacturers like HP or Lenovo very cheaply on eBay, often less than $60.
That’s probably not the complication most people are thinking of, though. For most people, the idea of setting up a server that does all the things I just mentioned sounds exhausting. And even a few years ago, it would have been. But there’s a beautiful project called Yunohost, explicitly built to make running a home server a breeze. If you know your way around your own computer, you can run a home server with Yunohost.
The tutorial on their website walks you through how to run it, and the Yunohost project will even help you get a web address of your own set up, so other people can use your server with a convenient link. You don’t need to know your way around a command line, you don’t need to be an IT whiz. All you need to do is keep an open mind and be willing to try something new.
I had already set up a home server the complicated way, but I redid it when I found out about Yunohost. Setting up my server – which, just to remind you, is a cloud storage service like Google Docs, a music streaming service like Spotify, a TV/movie streaming service like Netflix, and a website host for this blog – took me about two hours, and most of that was just making sure things like my old blog posts got carried over properly.
In conclusion…
You can claw back a little bit of control from the big tech companies that are running your online life. It’ll save you money, it’ll keep your data private, and most importantly, you can share the benefits with other people. Building a little corner of the Internet that you can truly call your own can really change your life, even if just a little bit.
It also helps give the right-wing billionaires who *own* those big tech companies just that smidgen less power over you, something which can help put your mind at ease as America tips further and further into hell.
It’s cheaper than you think, it’s easier than you think, and it’s more rewarding than you think. And if you don’t have the technical know-how to keep a home server running for yourself, chances are, you have a friend or family member who does. In the dry, sandy landscape of the corporate Internet, you owe it to yourself to build – or share – an oasis.
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