© 2026 Gregory D. Weber
Activities leading up to 2024. Published March 23, 2026.
The previous article dealt with the software I chose for running personal services (email, calendar, contacts, web) in order to escape the googlaconda. Here, I review the considerations leading to my decision about whether to run this software at home, like Mrs. Clinton, or in the cloud.
In a previous effort to escape from Google, I ran Radicale to serve calendar and contacts on my desktop computer at home. It worked to some extent, but the result was not entirely satisfactory. The troubles, as I recall them, were
Since the server (the desktop computer) was not running all the time, there were times when it was inaccessible to the clients. That did not make it unworkable, because the clients would store the data locally on their devices, and after the server was back up, they would reconnect and synchronize with it. But there were frequent error messages (“notifications”) from the clients when they could not connect, and those annoyed me, even though I understood they were nothing to worry about. My mobile devices also could not connect to the server when I was away from home, because the server was known only on the home local area network, not on the Internet.
Since I was using DNS from the router my ISP provided, I had to go through some tricks to give the server a name that would be recognized even on the LAN. I don’t remember what these tricks were. I don’t think they were worth remembering.
It costs money to rent a cloud server.
The company providing the cloud server might snoop on my data. However, I don’t think they would have an incentive to do so, unless they were an advertising company like Google, or I were suspected of breaking the law.
If we lose access to the Internet, we lose access to the server.
Data are relatively secure, unless someone breaks into my home.
I already own the server, so there is no cost to buy or rent.
My desktop server is old and might fail at any time.
Of course, I back it up. But still.
My desktop server consumes electricity, and that also costs money.
The network connection is relatively slow, via cable modem; and slower upwards than downwards.
If I run my desktop server 24 hours a day, my wife will not understand why, and she will be unhappy.
My ISP assigns a varying IP address to our home, and getting DNS to work with that would take some doing.
If we lose connection to the Internet, the way our ISP-provided modem works, we also lose connectivity on the LAN, so again clients will be unable to connect to the server. Strange, but so it is. Well, this is not really a disadvantage of homelab compared to cloud; it’s just a non-advantage.
Server hardware is relatively new and unlikely to fail.
Fast network connection.
Can easily run 24 hours a day.
Not all of these considerations might apply to you, but they do to me. I decided to run my server in the cloud.
The next issue will be [choosing a hosting provider]. I am looking for something cheap.