For anyone interested in the hosting-at-home idea, check out the FreedomBox mailing list archives. They were discussing innovative things to do with home hosting years ago. For example, you could use an open source, federated social networking platform like Diaspora to connect with your friends. They don't even have to be IRL friends, they could be anonymous people you meet on the internet, because your pods would be hidden services. You could offer each other distributed, encrypted, version controlled back ups. So I offer 10 GB of space to each of 10 friends, and they offer the same, and I get 100 GB of distributed backup space from them. If my box dies, I get a new one and download my back ups. They even discussed backing up PGP private keys that way. In an anonymous community, your PGP key is your identity. So what happens when you lose it? They suggested breaking it into pieces and distributing them to your friends. Choose people who are in different social circles, so they don't all know each other and can't collude to reconstruct your private key (although it's symmetrically encrypted anyway with a strong password). Then if you lose your key, download the pieces from your friends and reconstruct it. In the best setup, they wouldn't know they are hosting a piece of your key, and only you would know the full set of people who have the pieces. Plus, home hosting is the cheapest hosting you'll ever get that isn't advertising based. A nettop box or plug computer are sufficient to do everything described above. That costs at most $300 and might last 5 years, so you're essentially getting a low end dedicated server for $5 a month, less than the cost of most web hosting, and you can run all kinds of cool shit on it: social networks, game servers, email servers, other messaging clients, xmpp servers, Tor, Bitcoin clients, etc, etc.