Back in 2009, anynone with a Nokia could have a personal website running on their own phone. Sadly this amazing piece of tech was never widely adopted. Today’s phone are far more powerful than those Nokias both in performance and battery backup and still we don’t see anyone running a server on their phone. Why?
I think this was never implemented on phones because there’s no incentive for large corporations to work on something like this.
A number of cloud providers offer an always-free tier.
https://github.com/cloudcommunity/Cloud-Free-Tier-Comparison
True, but those are either available in limited supply in any nearby location, only free for a short while or provide servers that are slower than a smartphone.
You can set up a VPN with port forwards to get around this problem, but that’s a waste of a server in some kind of data center when the phone itself would be perfectly capable anyway.
Things intended for local use, like Pihole also don’t work on cloud servers without getting banned for DNS abuse.
What are you talking about? GitHub pages is just one example of a web page host that’s free for everyone, super fast and reliable.
Even if you need to host something that has a backend, there are free options with significantly fewer downsides than hosting on your phone.
Cloud servers may be a bad solution for things like pinhole, but your phone would be dead in four hours if you were forcing it to stay awake to respond to every DNS request on your network.
If you’re talking about using your phone as a stationary server that you leave plugged in, isn’t that just an extremely overpriced raspberry pi with no free IO ports?
It’s an interesting idea, but it’s just so much worse than any other option that I can’t imagine anyone seriously wanting to do it.
Are you talking about running a public DNS resolver?
That’s a very different topic that wasn’t part of the original post as far as I can tell.
There have always been (and there always will be) countless solutions for hosting a website for free. Even ignoring the security implications, mobile networks are not designed to do what you want to do. Full stop. If you can’t find a cloud provider in 2023 that will host a free website that will meet your needs, you aren’t looking hard enough.
Mobile providers spend billions in CAPEX every single year to keep up with ever-increasing demand (spectrum, base stations, radios, antennas, etc.) and even then they can barely keep up in some areas.
Every device attached to a given cell shares the resources of that cell. And uplink bandwidth is specifically scarce. Don’t be a bad neighbor.
I’ve been using AWS Amplify for the past five years completely for free. You’d have to get a huge website to get to the point where they start charging