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.
Yes, but it’s behind a Cloudflare tunnel, in general it just makes my life easier since it hides the real IP and I can filter out bots and crap before it ever gets to my home connection.
It’s a peertube instance that I mostly use for uploading game clips for friends, but it’s technically public and on the internet.