Just curious to find out if it is common for hacker to run own server at home. An always on computer for running web query scripts, serving media files, personal git server etc. If you have one, what do you use it for? Or you're running everything off the cloud?
I have 3 VPS'es rented for various projects. Also a Synology NAS at home (it switches off and on automatically at a daily schedule), used mostly as a backup storage.<p>I use GoodSync to synchronize my Documents folder with the NAS, and the NAS pushes nightly encrypted snapshots to one of my VPS.<p>You can rent a VPS for as low as few bucks per month, so why bother with keeping it at home?<p>At <a href="http://www.buildyourvps.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.buildyourvps.com/</a> you can rent a VPS extremely cheap. It's a bit slow, but totally fine for a Git repository storage (powered by Gitolite)
I'm in the middle of setting up a bunch of little servers under VMware on my Windows desktop. I'll probably move them to a dedicated Linux VM host at some point. They're all Ubuntu Server instances with 1 CPU and not much RAM. The first one I set up was an apt-cacher server to cache packages from the Ubuntu archives for the other VMs :) I'll be adding a fileserver (ftp and probably NFS), a dedicated build machine (with more CPU and RAM) and a firefox sync server. I might add a diaspora node, email server, and/or a little web server for a blog.
For the longest time I ran my mail/dns/web systems from home on a dedicated host. About 4 years ago, I moved and decided to retire my host, and switched to linode linux VPS to host my mail/dns/web/ssh, and have never returned. My home PC is nothing but a client these days. I SSH into my linode for practically all else.