Is it just up-front cost? I understand that for larger instances because they’d have to setup heftier systems, but even micro-instances seem to rent cloud compute when they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.
Edit: I understand that self-hosting is a skill that takes years to learn, and I’m aware that the vast majority of people on Earth choose to spend their time and energy investing into completely different topics. However, Lemmy tends to attract the techy type, so I suppose I just assumed the ratio of self-hosters-to-not would be higher. I’m not saying it’s trivial, just that I presume more Lemmings know how to do it than, say, Redditors (taking total users into account ofc)
Convince your partner that you need £600 for hardware box and then 4x£200 for hard drives (before HDDs became a mess, now those HDDs are impossible to find AND they are £480 off the back of the lorry).
But cost aside, I know how to self host and solve most of the issues around it but I don’t know much and don’t have many plumbing tools, or carpentry, I can do some basic things but it will be shit and wonky.
That’s why you pay for experts who can do what you cannot. For instance I need to probably replace threads and risers and I would not be able to do that myself without breaking the entire staircase (I tried to start)