Usually, I’d aim for the cloud environments for public resources (serving more than like 20 people), as the traffic won’t be hitting your home network.
Additionally, selfhosting a public service like Lemmy on your home environment probably wouldn’t have the same uptime or reliability, as I only have one strong ISP signal, and no backup generator.
However, pricing wise, selfhosting at home is much cheaper for the processing power you get.
I would and do. I have gig fiber which is more than enough for both my home and web service uses. The level of hardware I can bring to bear is far beyond what I could afford in a DC. Sure there are sometimes internet or power problems that you don’t usually get in a DC but they are rare and are made up for by me having physical access to my servers when something goes wrong.
Plus it’s fun.
If I did, I would put it behind something like Cloudflare. I do host a number of lower-traffic WordPress sites from home (<1k hits month). Oddly enough I actually do have backup power so reliability is pretty good.
I would not host anything bandwidth-heavy.
I avoid it for security reasons. But I have heard using Cloudflare can alleviate some concerns. And it is tempting to host at home because I have significantly more resources and bandwidth than I pay for on my cloud VPS