Which is perfectly fine for China, but no western government or company who hopes to do business with them will consider this, and for good reason.

hah, my comment appears much more naive than I thought possible.

WPS apparently has 80% market share in Chinese government and state owned enterprise. They used MS from 2000-2005, In 2006 they released Uniform Office Format (UOF) which MS doesn't support(!?) UOF works better with Chinese fonts. 2012 Kingsoft offered Enterprise WPS and became the standard.

It's not going to be a valid alternative in the west - certainly not something any government would even consider.

How much inflation has there been since the last price increase? From 2022 to 2025 it look likes like about 11%, so not all that different if you're trying to keep a round number.

That's an overly broad generalization. Shower curtains are pretty common in Norway, and I've found them in hotels all over Europe and even one in Japan.

How many WordPress sites even need this? I have several running and none of them use anywhere close to enough bandwidth that I have to worry about it.

Agreed. I think it should be called "storage saver" and focus on deleting the images from your server and storing in r2, though there's plenty of plugins already that do this "media offloading"

That could work as a separate plugin. This one is intentionally not an offloader. WordPress keeps storage and transformations, I only rewrite the final URL.

That’s the main question for me now: is there a subset of users who can’t or won’t switch their nameservers to Cloudflare, yet still need a lot of bandwidth?

It’s possible that group doesn’t exist.

There is always going to be a point of failure. For many of us, self-hosting on a dedicated server, VPS, or some sort of cloud service is much better than keeping the hardware to do it at home.

My stuff is spread out among a dedicated server and 3 VPS's. --I could and should drop one of the VPS's, but if it'll take me a couple of hours, it's just not worth it until I actually have the time to spare.

It depends of your needs and resources of course but you can keep in some drawer or basement some old or small PC and you basically do not have to spend money on this, but for paid servers you have to spend 20-50$/month for something sensible. 1tb of backup in some s3 service costs like 120$ per year, and 1TB is not that much. In reality paid servers will be close to 1k$/year and in that price you can have sensible machine.

Sure, I could get a server at home, but then I have to figure out how to make it quiet enough that I don't notice it while keeping it from overheating - something that's hard enough to do with the equipment I already have. And then I have to worry about what happens if somebody decides to have fun trying to DDOS something on my home connection. Again, easier to rent a dedicated server so I don't have to worry about it.

I guess it depends on your country climate, here, where I live in the basement I have steady 22-23 degrees C, so not a problem really. Also I do not have even GPU there which is the most problematic part usually.

About DDOS, you should not your server directly connected to the internet. Use some router or managed switch first. Usually it have already some kind of protection on whatever device is connected to your internet provider infrastructure.

Another question is why would anybody DDOS you? You are not important enough. When I bought domain and connected it to my VPS - I got almost instantly visitors (probably bots looking for new domains being registered) trying bruteforce an access. And I almost instantly blocked Root login and Password auth. They were still trying to login. So I moved the port to higher one. It was calm for few months and then they found new port and again tried to ram it down. So I blocked IPs only to predefined set.

It was exactly the same when I opened my server to the internet with new domain. From that point of view it does not matter if this is your machine, VPS or dedicated server on some rack somewhere. You are responsible for its security.

When I read that someone disable password login (rightfully so), then they take additional steps to stop some bots to randomly brute force them with a password…

If I self-host at home and my internet connection goes down so I can't access anything remotely, then I'm still SOL until I can get home. And millions of people are stuck with crappy upload speeds that make plenty of services that they may want to self-host nonviable if they care about being able to access it from anywhere.

Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hosting.

Reminds me of self sufficiency farming. If you grow your own food you will be impacted by the yield of that farm, rather than going to the supermarket and buy the food there. If the soil is bad then it might be difficult to impossible to do self sufficiency farming.

What you describe is an unfortunate result of the terrible bandwith situation at your (and others’) location. It is not, however, a compelling argument to redefine a term to suit your liking.

(Also, with 4G, 5G, and satellite-based Internet, an alternate (albeit low-bandwith) route for emergency access is fairly straightforward to set up.)

Sorry, but nobody chose you as the arbiter of terminology. You can call your option home-hosting if you'd like, but we'll keep considering our scenarios to be self-hosting.

I was in Portland less than a month ago and had no problems. Sure, there was one time I crossed the street to avoid someone who was clearly homeless and mentally ill, but I never found myself feeling unsafe.

Unfortunately homelessness is something that can't be solved by one city or even one state. Feeding, housing, and getting them treatment is expensive and not something even the wealthier cities have the budget to do on their own. And the first major city that tries will have to deal with other places dropping more homeless people on their doorstep - that's one thing that both red and blue cities have been guilty of as you can read about at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

> there was one time I crossed the street to avoid someone who was clearly homeless and mentally ill, but I never found myself feeling unsafe.

Seems a contradiction.

There's homeless and mentally ill people in all major cities. Or, at least, the ones that matter.

They're usually harmless, just troubled. You're not in much danger walking down the street; you're actually in much more danger driving down it.

In my experience, the largest predictor for how often you run into homeless people isn't city size, how much money the local police have, or how the residents vote, but how walkable the area is. Homeless people go where traffic is, foot traffic especially, because panhandling needs an audience.

There is a big difference between feeling uncomfortable and being in a genuinely unsafe situation, and the less you are used to seeing the homeless, the more out of touch with reality your gut feelings are.

It really isn't when many cities have apps that give you real-time information as to when to expect the next bus.

So you're telling me I shouldn't bother to take a split-second to glance down the street, but instead...

...grab my phone, unlock it, navigate to the app, wait for it to load, wait for it to figure out my location, wait for it to make an API call, try to figure out which of the two "34th and 7th" stops is the one going in the direction I want (since it's a two-way street with bus stops on both side of the intersection), click on one randomly, confirm from the first bus destination listed that I did click on the correct direction, otherwise go back and click on the other one, and then look at its ETA?

Sometimes it really is just better to use your eyes, to figure out that the bus is going to reach the bus stop in about 30 seconds, and that it'll take you 30 seconds of brisk walking to reach it in time, so you'd better start making a beeline now.