> that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out
I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again.
Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever.
The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.
Mesh Wireguard VPNs like Tailscale/Zerotier/etc. have brought it back. Now you can self-host all sorts of stuff and your ISP just sees regular VPN traffic like a remote worker. Handy for self-hosted movies/TV, photos, ebooks, and NAS.
I use a free-tier Oracle Cloud VPS as a wireguard relay for all my public services. Yes, Oracle sucks donkey balls to deal with, but it's pretty set and forget, and they give you essentially unlimited bandwidth (like 50TB/mo each way or something I've never been able to get remotely close to)
That makes a lot of sense, but I guess if I'm already doing that, why would I not just pay the extra $5 a month for a VPS too? I'm sure there are reasons (you need a more powerful server, interesting hardware, interlink to home automation, whatever).
As the other commenter mentioned the big reason is media storage. It can work particularly well now that you can run container images directly on a consumer NAS to serve your media.
Another reason is locality - all of my media still works at home when my ISP is down, to the point I sometimes don't notice the outages.
I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again.
Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever.
The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.