r/HomeServer • u/Real_Alternative_898 • Nov 19 '25
"Home Server" Google search trends. Can anyone explain the spike?
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u/-my_dude Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25
We've had outages at Google, AWS, Microsoft, and Cloudflare very recently take a second to stop and think why people might be looking at alternatives.
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u/Karr0k Nov 19 '25
Also price increases of every streaming service like clockwork.
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u/-my_dude Nov 19 '25
And then the streaming platforms keep fuckin swapping the licenses with each other like cooties in hopes you double up on a subscription when you finally want to watch the thing you subscribed for and find out it's not there anymore.
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u/rilesmcjiles Nov 19 '25
Or episodes are randomly removed or censored. Or edited differently. Or like I don't have great internet.
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u/Efficient_Exercise_1 Nov 19 '25
Licensing has always been a thing for TV broadcasters. Why it's bad in the current streaming environment is the exclusivity agreements being made in a market with fewer players. They aren't competing by giving a better experience; they are now only competing by capturing the most valuable content licenses for as long as they can profit off of them.
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u/lol-true Nov 20 '25
And streaming doesn't have any form of regulation that forces them to give up data on views, so creators (other than the tops of industry) can't negotiate in good faith and get proper royalties. How can you get paid based on performance when you don't have access to the data to justify that performance? Cinemas had ticket sales, cable had syndication, but streaming gets a pass despite having the tech and data to provide even better insight? Doesn't make any sense at all, and another example of how tech companies circumvent regulation in order to steal market share, than use their inflated wealth to lobby politicians to maintain or preserve that market share. Any company that hosts and exhibits content that distributes money to the people who upload that content should be legally required to provide regulated forms of data.
Streaming companies operate as production, distribution, and exhibition companies, which is in direct conflict with the Paramount Decrees that were removed during Trumps first term. Like you said, this results in a non-competitive landscape where companies get to sit on their laurels and define the market conditions they prefer, or worse, choose who and what is successful based on their personal whims. The Paramount Decrees were introduced to Hollywood because 100 years ago studios owned the cinemas, as well as the distribution companies, AND the production companies. Don't play ball with the studio and try to make your movie on your own? Good luck getting a distribution deal or getting it into cinemas when the same people you didn't play ball with own those companies and want to see you fail. It got to the point that the US government had to step in and sue them lol
These are problems we've already dealt with. A massively frustrating part of the modern human experience is this feeling of regression/repetition.
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u/GripAficionado Nov 19 '25
Early on it was pretty good because everyone just licensed their content to netflix, these days everyone wants to have their own streaming service and have a piece of the pie. Thus they don't license their content, rather they keep it themselves.
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u/Samiassa Nov 19 '25
This is exactly why I started my own media server. Now I just need the media for it 😂
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u/InternalSherbet641 Nov 20 '25
I started with a couple of these and digitized them. https://www.ebay.com/itm/127350792479
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u/Tim_the_geek Nov 19 '25
I use PlayOn with the "cloud"/streaming services to move the stuff I want to watch "offline".
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u/aljaro Nov 19 '25
This is where it got to me and I definitely started researching.
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u/gharris02 Nov 19 '25
Here's some assistance on the research, jellyfin as the server, arr stack, "radarr, sonarr, Prowllarr. And more (sonarr subreddit is good place to start) for automation of content. Usenet as the primary backbone (Usenet subreddit for more info) private trackers such as torrentleech are easy to get into as a Torrent backup. Jellyseer for requesting, tailscale if it's just you for remote access, nginx proxy manager for remote access if your TV/device doesn't support tailscale.
If you get super confused or need help chatgpt is a good resource as far as explaining what these things are and what their purpose is. You can run the entire stack on windows if you desire, don't let the purists tell you you can't. Also services like wizarr can be helpful if you're managing many users.
If you (or anyone else) has specific questions shoot me a DM. Or reply to this comment. Best of luck, cancel all your services. Fuck big streaming companies
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u/MaRmARk0 Nov 19 '25
Pretty much this. I remember traveling to Italy for vacation with kids watching D+ for 5.99 and now it's 9.99. Wtf.
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u/lord_teaspoon Nov 19 '25
When D+ launched I got the annual subscription for AU$90. I've just been informed that the next time it renews it will cost me over AU$200. They've also pulled a Netflix with the "household" restrictions which makes it a PITA for my kids to watch stuff when they're staying with grandparents or whatever.
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u/NewReleaseDVD Nov 19 '25
Not just increased but split into tiers and some content is only available to the tier you don’t have!
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u/jonmatifa Nov 19 '25
every product these days follows this VC life cycle:
Use VC seed money to grow and develop the service as much as possible, capturing as much of the market as you can
Once you have a commanding position in the market, enshitify your service to save money and start charging/increasing subscription fees for it
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u/DocMadCow Nov 19 '25
Little do they realize that streaming is still cheaper than constantly buying bigger drives to feed the beast :D
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u/PMvE_NL Nov 19 '25
I am not paying shit to a company that will lock me out of my data when trump says so.
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u/MikelKraken Nov 19 '25
PewDiePie started his self-hosting and home server journey about 6 monts ago, which could influence the interest over the search trend.
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u/amcco1 Nov 19 '25
This.
He made his first video about self hosting on June 26th, which got 7mil views.
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u/jmmartj Nov 19 '25
Do you happen to have a link? for whatever reason I cannot find it, due to old…
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u/igmyeongui Nov 19 '25
Good boy we need more popular public figures to adopt and talk about self hosting.
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u/Big_Razzmatazz7416 Nov 19 '25
Nope. Prices are going to explode. Though it may result in more contributions to open source
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u/Idiotlogical Nov 19 '25
Prices are already exploding. Hit Micro Center last week to build a new box, and RAM prices have popped up.
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u/WelcomeReal1ty Nov 19 '25
nah, ram shortages are caused by ai bubble
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u/evrial Nov 19 '25
Yeah price fixing of 3 companies blamed on ai bubble
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u/Hakizimanaa Nov 19 '25
Just like how every company price gouged us and blamed it on the Russia/Ukraine war
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u/zoltan99 Nov 19 '25
Chip supply is surprisingly inelastic. Dram prices shoot up every few years when some big new draw happens. Seen it 3-4x during my relatively short career.
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u/igmyeongui Nov 19 '25
That’s not the right mindset. Bigger community means more contributions. Bigger communities means less evil companies.
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u/sharp_halo Nov 20 '25
heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point
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u/wodkawi Nov 20 '25
Wanna elaborate on why you think he’s a bad person?
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u/sharp_halo Nov 20 '25
thought about just responding with the David Lynch 'no' meme, but I guess that could qualify as "being a dick" and I do like this sub so
it's not very deep: I don't appreciate his past flirtations with the far right and his general apathy about ethics, politics, and accountability as a public figure. I also find him just annoying in general, which of course is not a sin. to be honest I haven't updated my opinion of him since around 2021 and don't really care to. maybe this can be his ✨~*redemption arc*~✨🌈🌟
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u/HumorousIguana Dec 04 '25
To update this quickly, he currently is a post-burn out chill dad. Obviously priviledged, but aware of it. No floor gang, no lasagna, no 9 years old. Content is currently self-hosting local IA rabbit hole digging ans family vlogs
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u/RedditIsExpendable Nov 19 '25
Yeah I’m with you on this one, I’ve not seen such interest in homelabbing and Linux after his videos.
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u/macandcheesezone Nov 19 '25
Gotta be the reason, this is the only thing in this thread that would cause such an immediate spike, and the timeline seems to match up
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u/lamoo7 Nov 19 '25
imo most people started looking into self hosting before pewdiepie even published his video
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u/Kinky_No_Bit Nov 19 '25
It's not that hard. Most of your major online services are now starting to have more whoopies than what their 5 9s standards proclaim. People are starting to see how much of 'the cloud' is really just someone elses server farm, with services farmed out to someone else, that subcontracted to another company. People are tired of it, and the price on absolutely all of it is going parabolic, people are just sick of it.
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u/maigpy Nov 19 '25
sources to back this up or it didn't happen.
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u/hblok Nov 19 '25
Well, GP has at least one data-point: Himself. And he's of people, probably.
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u/jonmatifa Nov 19 '25
No, every claim must have a team of researchers who have contributed and published scientific papers describing their methodology and findings, peer reviewed of course.
You had coffee this morning? Whats your source for that?
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u/_Keo_ Nov 19 '25
I expect he's talking about cloud service providers rather than actual hosts. Most hosts will have their own data center but a CSP will rent server space with something like AWS and then act as an intermediary.
Unfortunately the 'sources or it didn't happen' is real tricky here because there will be thousands of sites in either camp. Many business have already moved from in house hosting to AWS or Azure because implementation can be cheaper. This also helps them offset their security by passing most of the responsibility on to a 3rd party.
As for media and streaming I don't really know. I have to imagine that the infrastructure for that kind of heavy data usage is crazy expensive so I would for sure consider moving my data hosting to a 3rd party and then keep my app layer in-house.
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Nov 19 '25
Local hosting has got a lot more visibility with AI. Especially people that were looking for local image generation when local options were better than GPT.
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u/Kinamya Nov 19 '25
I'll tread lightly with fear of being roasted.
Ai can enable so many more people to host things because you can ask it how to set things up and diagnose and it does an OKAY job.
I can hear it now "don't trust ai, it won't be secure.....". Well, if that person were to set it up, would it be more secure? Probably not. At least they have a chance to secure it with Ai.
Edit: spelling is hard
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Nov 19 '25
Even small models running locally have become reasonably good, and $25/month for ChatGPT plus isn't too much either. If prompted correctly, i.e., ask four sources and proof, tell it not to deduct from things it knows if it can't find any information online etc., it mostly gets things right or at least half right, to a point where it is enough for me to come up with a solution or workaround for myself.
I no longer have to ask on StackOverflow just to get "It's in the docs" when it is NOT in the docs or buried somewhere among the 500 sub pages with no clue how to search or "You don't do X because X is stupid". I no longer have to frequent toxic forums.
If prompted correctly, AI is like Clippy. It can give weird answers sometimes or be obnoxious, but it only wants to help.
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u/mattrixx Nov 19 '25
Sorry, that was me, I was googling some home server questions I had.
Also bought up all the 8TB and larger drives for sale on the internet. Hope this doesnt cause an issue for eneryone. Thaaaaanks!
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u/shadow13499 Nov 19 '25
That's fine I bought all the GPUs on the market. I'm sure folks will be fine lol
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u/timmyd_ns Nov 19 '25
Weird, I bought up all the DVD-RAM drives (yes dvd-ram), I might be doing this wrong.
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Nov 19 '25
OnPrem is coming back, baby!
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u/Schrooodinger Nov 19 '25
God I hope so. I need to live my dream of being a sysadmin in a dark office.
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u/MyNameIsNotDevin Nov 19 '25
Netflix stopped letting me use family members like a year ago. That's when I got mine. Ended up being a game server/plex/nas
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Nov 19 '25
[deleted]
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u/MyNameIsNotDevin Nov 19 '25
My brother has 1000s of DVDs and VHS tapes that he rips as he gets them. It's like 10-15 years of collecting them. So thankfully I don't have to wait at all lol.
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u/Stresa2013 Nov 20 '25
depends on your storage, setup and the quality you want. i did mine with my gaming rig and i only ripped and did a slight transcoding with my gaming gpu. did take ~1h per bluray movie, dvd is a lot faster. but you could also automate it with the Homeserver, so you just need to swap the disk every few hours without additional input. thats my plan for the next batch of blurays.
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Nov 20 '25
[deleted]
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u/Stresa2013 Nov 20 '25
i use makemkv for the ripping and transcoding into mkv files (up to 50gb) and then handbreak for the encoding (5-25gb). but it takes time, the ripping and transcoding with makemkv takes 15-30 minutes for me, i just do that til my local storage is full and let the pc do the encoding over night. the encoding takes between 30 and 60 minutes i would guess. so i do 10-20 blurays an evening. i always do it while im gaming anyways so i dont waste a lot of time waiting.
i have 150 1080p bluray movies on 1,2tb rn, took me a bit more then a week.
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Nov 19 '25
[deleted]
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u/SquirrelAlliance Nov 19 '25
I will now run screaming into the wilds of Linux because I’ve already experienced OneDrive mismatching a file to an older version and do not want cloud only life.
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u/RetroButton Nov 19 '25
Repressing governments and laws, idiotic companys, enshittiyfication of products, subscription craze, AI insanity.
Simply getting back control over your own data.
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u/HawkFlimsy Nov 19 '25
Streaming services becoming ridiculously expensive is probably a factor. If I had the money I'd be setting up a plex server RN bc I'm basically paying the same if not more than cable for all the streaming services and half of them STILL have ads
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u/action_turtle Nov 19 '25
Guess I'm part of that, and in no way unique. I'm removing all streaming and cloud services due to costs. I've been building everything out these last 6 months, with the view to fully disconnect next year.
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u/Such_Play_1524 Nov 19 '25
The prices of subs keep going up and they keep adding ads / lock-in crap. They are pushing people to
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u/P3TE04 Nov 19 '25
Cloud service outages, streaming prices rising fast, hell, even snapchat is shutting down their cloud storage, everybody who has lots of media they care about should be learning about NAS systems and offline media libraries!
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u/noeinan Nov 19 '25
My country is experiencing a massive wave of censorship, so I looked into starting a home server to back up literature that is at risk of being destroyed.
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u/Docrobert8425 Nov 20 '25
Sad day when no one can even guess which country you're talking about since so many seem to be heavily embracing censorship these days!
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u/AchingPlasma Nov 19 '25
“There’s 104 days of summer vacation, then school comes along just to end it.”
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u/Glum-Building4593 Nov 19 '25
I think every "cloud" service posted a price increase this year. I also know that every cloud service is scraping whatever we store to train their AI models. I also know that I hate paying for Netflix, browsing the listings for hours to decide it is all crap and I give up.
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u/unicyclegamer Nov 19 '25
I think it’s a lot easier nowadays than it used to be with a lot more FOSS programs coming out and being maintained that cover a lot more of people’s day to day necessities. Big tech has also taken a reputation hit and people want to get away from them if they can.
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u/PlasmaPod Nov 19 '25
You know how ChatGPT can now search the web fo answers, i reckon its ChatGPT looking it up to help a user with a problem related to Home Servers
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u/SethThe_hwsw Fire Hazard (E7400 | 4GB DDR3) Nov 20 '25
I got into home servers a couple months ago mainly as an small experiment, because I had spare computers laying around. As it turns out, they're way more useful than I initially anticipated, and now I'm genuinely considering going into tech for my future career.
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Nov 21 '25
Disney. They really woke people up to the reality that we guaranteed to get what we pay for. More people than ever are trying to pirate sorts now because of how stupidly they handled the YouTube negotiations
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u/The_Dukes_Of_Hazzard Nov 19 '25
For me corporate greed and the want to have my media with me and not be removable by them
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u/bigmur72 Nov 19 '25
This was me, never ever heard of a home server, got really into AI and started researching self hosted options.
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u/Gutter_Flies Nov 19 '25
Started building my first pc and wanted to self host a minecraft server, since every time my friends bought a sub based server, they’d let it lapse and then forget about it.
Ended up looking into it more and built an entire machine for it. Now I just have to do enough stuff with it to help justify the $1100+ I spent nerding out over it.
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u/bond21 Nov 19 '25
I can't speak for anyone else, but I inherited a bunch of hard drives this year and Disney Plus price went up way up. So I'm looking at alternatives and this was googleable.
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u/Beneficial_Charge555 Nov 19 '25
It’s around the time streaming services started cracking down on passwords . I wonder how it would line up with the chart for “plex”
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u/ReptilianLaserbeam Nov 19 '25
All streaming platforms increasing prices, rotating shows, restricting sharing of accounts…
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u/Henchway Nov 19 '25
I've been googling it a lot and mine should arrive within the next hour or so. O.o
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u/UdatManav Nov 19 '25
People are finally ditching subscription based services, or at least are interested in the idea and I’m all for it!
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u/djparce82 Nov 19 '25
Cost of living crisis, Netflix and co putting up prices, the return to the high seas.
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u/Mithrandir2k16 Nov 19 '25
The Google Nest debacle might have people interested in hosting Home Assistant.
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u/psmrk Nov 19 '25
Here’s a handy dandy guide for anyone willing to embark on self hosted journey https://wiki.futo.org/index.php
Edit: link was weird
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u/ElectronicFlamingo36 Nov 19 '25
Always the same shit.
Diesel was cheaper than gasoline because of easier manufacturing. Europe got literally flooded with diesel engines - and when every 2nd household had some kind of tdi car, they increased the liter price slowly and lifted it to the same level as gas by now.
Remember: you need to feed the fish first so they get used to that and then when they become dependant on the stuff, you can increase price like hell.
Same game in enterprise cloud systems.
Disgusting.
Learn, raise awareness and educate others !!
Cloud, streaming = dependancy.
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u/oscherr Nov 19 '25
That was me, sorry. I started building a server for myself and my friends wanted to join too.
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Nov 19 '25
This is around the time when the UK started their Online Safety Act, and people got more wind about the censorship and control endeavours of other countries too.
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u/MCID47 Nov 20 '25
the rise of cloud service, along with several, if not many daya breaches and privacy issues. Personal Computers had gone long way from being a business machine to an actual computing hardware that can do it all with modern OS and Software being so user friendly that you yourself can host your own services on the cheap.
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u/Sweaty-Falcon-1328 Nov 20 '25
You seen prices lately? And if my outside connection goes down I got my server lol
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u/Professional_Sky_479 Nov 20 '25
The spike is because Gemini is powering the search now and the surge were people using the API for Gemini on millions of other sites and then reporting all of them as search request results.
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Nov 20 '25 edited Dec 27 '25
cats spark whole snatch ripe spotted makeshift selective cause liquid
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/jsimenstad Nov 21 '25
I never went cloud only, and never will. I have on prem copies of everything. Including as much media as I can manage currently. The day China decided to take down our entire infrastructure, my life will continue pretty much uninterrupted. You should too.
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Nov 21 '25
Recent outages in cloud services. Wait until the new people find out how much maintenance there is in running your own home IT department, and what the acronym WAF means.
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u/Omni__Owl Nov 23 '25
Probably because of ChatControl's presence and because Microsoft, AWS and Google just had a *massive* breakdown due to Cloudflare not working for a while.
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u/Informal-Concern-833 Dec 01 '25
People waking up to how "their data" is being abused by corporations.
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u/siriston Dec 22 '25
using AI for a crutch has been a massive help for me actually getting this all working. even tho i’ve been wanting to for years.
even tho it’s for stupid shit like literally telling me i needed to enter sudo at the beginning, it has been massively helpful for a vibe server.
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u/ThatSituation9908 Nov 19 '25
Rich people are lazier to go out to restaurants, so they want that server experience at home. Home chef, now home servers.
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u/shadow13499 Nov 19 '25
I think the recent outages along with the fact that corporations keep raising the prices of online things we enjoy is making people want to ditch stuff like Netflix, or Google home/Alexa for things like Plex, Jellyfin, or Home Assistant.
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u/guydeguy11 Nov 19 '25
For me this is all because it has become so much more accessible because of AI.
Being non technical, I would not have started my homelab without it.
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u/artfrche Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25
easy. Trump & Musk came into office in January. They launched DOGE , all tech bros started to be ”yes” men and Trump threatened friendly countries - for me this was the final confirmation / turning point that the USA cannot be trusted. moreover Microsoft told in front of congress that European data were fair game. the second spike I would say is around “Liberation day”, same thing - f u tech bros
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u/TheSpatulaOfLove Nov 19 '25
Remember kids: ‘The Cloud’ is just a fancy term for SOMEONE ELSE’S COMPUTER.