Has the consumer home server market been abandoned?

[sickpup]

Morning chaps

The last few days I have been considering the future of the home server market, an area that has never been densely populated but in the last year seems to have been completely abandoned.

Back in December 2014 Microsoft stopped selling Windows Home Server 2011 and although it was supposed to be available for embedded builders until 2025 it now has end of life in 2016 only 5 years after introduction. It had a selling price of £39.95 and has been replaced with server essentials at a price of £290ish

I don't think home servers were introduced to the public correctly. See the recent explosion of NAS boxes in the consumer market and yet at the same time home servers which are more functional, in general cheaper and easier to set up have become a market failure which I consider extremely odd considering the rise of the IOT connectivity.

So what do others think of the future of servers in the home and the failure to market them?

[Taught2BCauti...]

I don't know what everyone else uses, or what for, but my Home Server runs on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) with virtualisation for client replication, and cloud storage.

For Multi-Media, I boot straight into XBMC.
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[sickpup]

And to the question I asked?

[t121anf]

Should get bigger but people are lazy and want a straight out of the box solution which servers aren't and NAS' are.

Never used a home server OS I went straight to Server 2008 due to it being readily available from work.

[Seb]

The problem is that both portable HDDs and little arm based NAS drives are so good that a full fat home server is about as niche a product as is imaginable.

They got marketed fairly hard via WHS v1 and HPs media smart boxes seemed to be a good seller, but 2011's lack of drive extender did a lot to derail the enthusiasm for it and I guess it's never recovered since.

Do note that UHD video finally landing will give the WHS market a fair boost though if perhaps not for the most legitimate of reasons. It's going to be a long time until an off the shelf NAS can transcode 4K, whilst the majority of portable drives out there are going to be too small and too slow.

My server is ready for just about any bit rate that's imaginable now
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[Taught2BCauti...]

[Rogerborg]

What would you be serving at home, and to whom, that a general purpose server would look more attractive than a NAS box for storage, or an XBMC / Kodi box for media?


I needed to do:

Network storage for file sharing and user data backups, (not streaming video).
Run a small web server with some scripting support.
Provide web proxying over a secure connection.
Manage it all remotely via terminal.

= Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB drive. lighttpd + PHP, squid, rsync, samba, ssh, bish bosh bash, sudo job done.

Because I knew what I wanted, I got just what I needed, and setup and configuration was no problem.

It might have been easier with a Windows server OS, but that alone costs more than the Pi and Roger don't pirate no warez.

If easy configuration was my primary goal then I wouldn't be me and my requirements would be different. Whoa, deep.

tl;dr version - anyone who knows that they need what Windows Home Server provides might not need Windows Home Server to provide it.
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[stigger]

Why would anyone by windows for a home server?

The home server market never did run a MS server os it was either a windows pc doing some media sharing or some form of *nix.

To be honest with cloud storage being so cheap and in general network speeds so fast, the market is now vanishingly small.

[Andy_Pagin]

Nowadays you can buy any old biscuit tin desktop, bung linux on it and host websites with apache and expose the file system as a pretend ntfs server using Samba. Or just connect your Windows boxes as a peer-to-peer network. The massive performance and storage capacities of desktop hardware, and low prices make the whole concept of the home server a little redundant.
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[orac]

it wasn't how the server were introduced, its other things like its seems like a pain to setup, you have to have somewhere to put it, and run it all the time.

as time goes by, my WHS 2011 hardware is coming towards it end, specially with increasing hard drive requirements. I will be looking for new server setup, with the requirement of being able to setup my own cloud.

while on the subject of cloud storage, that is the other reason, most people are pretty much perma-connected and being able to access your data from anywhere for a small fee and no extra work is appealing to the lazy masses.
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[CaNsA]

[chrisw]

Dropbox and Netflix (and the like) - that's what happened to the home server market.

Couple that with the wide spread adoption of tablets and introduction of 'smart' TVs and you have a reduction in the general level of technical complexity in most homes.

Why would anyone other than a tinkerer or bored professional want the hassle of maintaining any kind of server at home when they can pay a few quid a month for someone else to do it while also making it more convenient to use?

It's the same reason why most people have very few tools at home, let alone all the tools required to fully maintain a car/bike - yes, a few do but they are people with an interest in the 'device' itself not just in it's use.

Edit:
Just to add - I used to run a home server for a few things but gave up and the things I want running permanently (other than media storage) now runs on a £6-a-month VPS.