Let me explain just a bit.About hosting on someone else's PC: last year, the power supply of our first server went down after two years of non-stop working. It was diagnosed and replaced in 43 minutes and the server restarted by a technician. Who can guarantee that? What good will person can monitor, repair and restart a PC 24/24 7/7 365/365 in 4 hours max (assuming of course the terms of our contract are respected but we have to assume they will be)? Also we do not depend on any private home connection to an ISP that may fail or be interrupted. In most situations, our traffic will simply be rerouted if something bad happens somewhere. And we do not depend on what someone is doing at home either (like downloading the last ISO of Ubuntou which is like 2GB IIRC or a ***** copy of a movie or of Autocad with all add-ons
)In more than 4 years, the full list of our troubles is the 43 minutes downtime I mentioned, and some hours of "lag" due to the switch just after our group of servers that was behaving bad intermittently (hence difficult to diagnose). We are at something like 99.97% uptime over 4 years.
(Of course, now that I said that, Murphy's law implies we'll experience a major failure...
)Now, you can ask if it is worth the work/investment/pain/whatever for a community of gamers. It's a good question to which I have no rational answer. I'm just proud we can deliver quality to AP members.
Your other point is that everything anyhow depends on the person who pays the bills. I'm not comfortable to talk about bills. I'll just mention that, in most situations, if something bad happened, AP would have enough time to either keep on with the current system or find other solutions.
Last but no least, all our tech stuff should allow us to build replacement solutions for aomainframe and more in the future. We've been working hard on that and it would be already done if days had 48 hours or if we could make time slow down.
.