Reliability, and depending on your work load the ability to use it commercially. Your house isn't going to have any meaningful reliability for either the network or power.
Your house will have one connection to the outside work, the DC should have multiple for redundancy (In case a digger goes through your network connection), and same for power any good DC will have their own redundant power supplies (Batteries, generators etc).
And if your server is serving a lot of traffic, your consumer home ISP might not be too happy about it. Theres a reason they split plans between home and business.
> Your house isn't going to have any meaningful reliability for either the network or power.
Not really a serious argument, but maybe worth looking at this these days. Mostly because I think as engineers we all have the desire to hit 100% uptime and reliability when in a lot of cases "close enough" might be a lot further than you think.
On the power end, a lot of people are getting to some form of local generation and storage (e.g., solar + batteries). Small backup generators aren't entirely unheard of. And on the network end, I'm probably not the only person that went to multiple connections when my ability to earn income became tied to my ability to be online from home.
As it sits right now, my power's not the most reliable in the world but because of that I already have a fair sized generator and a lot of fuel stored on-site (~5 days of gasoline, ~10 days of propane). I'm directly off of a fairly regionally important power line, so I'm usually fairly high up on the priority list during any major outage. (I mean, not "hospital" but if my power's out so are tens of thousands of others generally.) My grid power's rarely out for that long, and my local power even less since I have the generator. If I finally got around to adding some solar and storage to bridge between grid going down and the generator firing up I'd be able to pretty comfortable ignore power outages for over a week before I started needing to worry about making trips out to dump fuel in the generator or calling for some propane.
As far as connectivity, I've got three connections across two providers. All my traffic hits a real data center first so I can bond the connections (because residential) then flows to and from my house. One of the providers is wireless so the only single point of failure for cut lines is a few feet in front of my router.
I'm well aware this gets nowhere close to the reliability of a data center. I wouldn't run anything safety or life critical this way. I wouldn't run anything making a substantial amount of money this way. But there's a lot of stuff that fits in below "successful SaaS" and "life critical" that I think could tolerate an hour of downtime here or there that would get along just fine like this. And even if you think "well, you're clearly an insane person no one else is going to do that" I think there's still lots yet that could tolerate a day or two of downtime every year or two just fine. There are a lot of smaller services out there that businesses rely on that are hosted in AWS but aren't much more reliable than if they were running in someone's basement and they survive just fine.
- Getting a static IP and having your traffic not go through a NAT might be challenging or impossible depending on your home ISP. You can use dynamic DNS in some cases, but that's meh.
- If you want to send email from your server, you'll have a higher chance of it ending up in spam folders because of the residential IP.
- Home ISPs don't have SLAs. Your network was down for half a day without warning? Oh well. Things happen. We're sorry.
- Same goes for power, it's not as guaranteed at home as it is in a datacenter. Even if you install a UPS for your server, you can't be sure that the ISP's equipment will also work if you lose power.
I can't imagine it's actually illegal. Maybe cost-prohibitive and a bit noisy, but plenty of people have UPS systems for their local devices and backup generators.
