Keeping hardware running 24/7 cheaply is difficult. Expanding an existing setup is expensive. Consumer grade ISP’s will block unexpected network protocols sometimes seemingly for no reason. Dynamic DNS isn’t super robust, so several times I went on vacation and the DNS service would flake. Maybe it’s better if you pay more for it, but I have no complaints about my VPS. It’s nice to be able to just reliably reach my web stuff and not worry a cat bumped the power cable.

It is possible to use a dynamic DNS service. They’re typically pretty cheap. I did for several years. It kind of sucked so I rented a VPS.

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To add a little context, Standard Ebooks takes a subset of books from the Gutenberg Project and edits them into a more attractive, modernized standard. They add covers, fix typos and OCR mistakes. The same basic text, but with a slightly higher format quality.