I hosted websites on my own hardware for 20 years and it worked out well Recently I've been using a VPS, and that has many benefits and drawbacks. Is it worth paying for the VPS? Maybe. That all depends on your situation.

I don't know the game, but definitely an Atari.

Depends on what the machine is for.

I remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we're happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.

The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that's cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.

That may be a good idea, but the situation here was caused by corruption within the Canadian government, not by Google doing shady things.

In other words, the Canadian government tried to impose a link tax, and they've just discovered that both Google and Facebook don't think Canadian media is worth anything.

The best solution is to stop reading Canadian media. Those companies knew exactly what was going to happen, enough of them supported it, and they deserve to lose their readers.

Maybe it's not so mysterious. Maybe hotels in Russia should have bars over all of their windows to avoid such incidents in the future.