I have a limited 20Mbps upload speed but 16 TB of storage. I’m kinda just asking if there’s anything I can use it for. I’ll donate one purpose: seeding Anna’s Archive. Not sure on other causes.
Probably not what you’re looking for, but when I had a somewhat unstable internet connection, I’d just self host for myself as much as possible to reduce my reliance on the internet. I ran lancache to cache as many updates I could. I’d download kiwix archives at university and host them at home. I had ripped hundreds of DVDs for Jellyfin and I’d even sometimes record shows off of free to air TV with TVHeadEnd. I also self hosted languagetool (a Grammarly alternative). Although, I still do all that (and probably more) with stable gigabit fibre (except I no longer saw any point in lancache).
Funny how perspective changes things.
Growing up we had dialup. Around 2009 we got 1.5mbps down, something like 300kbps up. DSL, for 8 people.
We had that until… 2014? 2016? Then we got 10/1.5, mbps, down/up respectively.
We had that until 2022 ish, when we got 30/10. And I started self hosting with ease, plenty of bandwidth for myself and my immediate family’s needs.
Only last year, 2025, did we finally strike gold and get access to fiber. 8000/8000 available, but it’s spendy.
I’m used to living with significantly less, so I opted for the lowest tier, 300/300.
I feel like I’m legitimately living in the future right now, so fast.
I feel for everyone who is stuck with slow Internet. But it’s all perspective. And from my perspective, 20 up is plenty for most things your average person wants to do. More is always better, obviously. But even then, you don’t need gargantuan pipes to self host.
I will say, these days, anything less than 10/10 is criminal. 20/20 is slow but manageable. 30/30 is more than most normal people realistically need, though obviously, again, more is always better 🤷♂️
Store a lot of things you never access
Hope that helps 😌
You can do movies and shows and also music if you don’t go full blown 4k and it’s only you. Navidrome would run on a potato for music. lol
Fserve territory.
Xdcc does the either end. Lots of bw, low storage.
20mbps is enough for most things. It mostly limits how many peoppe you could share content to at once, but even then if you had say 4 people you wanted to stream a movie to jellyfin has options so you can limit each stream to 2mbps or whatever ends up working best.
Anna’s Archive.
Seed. I’d rather have at least one whole copy in a swarm versus a bunch of really fast peers that don’t have the complete files.
Yeah, this.
It’s annoying as hell waiting 6 weeks for someone to come online with that last 3%.
Anything I find like that I seed as long as I can
I have my seed box limit upload bandwidth to quite a low value, not because I hate leechers, but because I have to spread out my available data cap to maximize availability of over the long term. If I blow through my data in three days I’m not as much good to the network.
Just about anything as long as you don’t need to serve it to hundreds of people simultaneously. Hell, I once hosted Jellyfin over a 3G hotpot and it managed.
Pretty much any web-based app will work fine. Streaming servers (Emby, Plex, Jellyfin, etc) work fine for a few simultaneous people as long as you’re not trying to push 4K or something. 1080p can work fine at 4 Mbps or less (transcoding is your friend here). Chat servers (Matrix, XMPP, etc) are also a good candidate.
I hosted everything I wanted with 30 Mbps upload before I got symmetric fiber.
Jesus dude…was it good?
1080p buffered generously but it worked :) The sweet spot was having it transcode to 720p (yay hardware acceleration). I wasn’t sharing it with anyone at the time, so it was just me watching at work on one phone while using my second phone at home for internet.
Ttyi
I use my 50 mbps connection to host Plex/Jellyfin and I have a wireguard setup to allow me to access my files.
It works… Mostly. I have to manually set my streaming rate in Jellyfin to something reasonable to make it work remotely.
Downloading files from my server is an overnight process most times.
It also runs qbit with port forwarding to have faster uploading speeds. Everything manages to squeeze through that 50 mbps.
Hosting for the public, it’s honestly going to depend on how many users you are going to have. Pretty much anything that is light on bandwidth should be doable. Websites, blogs, wikis. XMPP chat servers might work. Matrix might work as well. Adding to your seeding idea, you might seed torrents for any Linux distros you happen to like or build torrent seeds for projects with larger download sizes. I seem to recall a project that would enable you to seed peertube channels as well, though I can’t find the project right now.
If it’s just you and maybe a few family and friends,say over a mesh VPN, what ever you want, though video streaming may be a bit much for that bandwidth. Any other type of personal media should be very doable. Books, music, that sort of thing.
An old school BBS like we used to do on dialup. Personally, Anna’s Archive seems a bit ‘hot’ right now and not because of popularity with users.
Movies, TV, porn. That’s what I started with anyway…
20 up isn’t terrible; I made do with 10 for 8 years, and that included hosting said movies and shows to friends.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
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