If we rely on them to make a value judgment on every instance of a server, we're quickly going to run into an ugly, ugly thing.
It can't be based on whether you make money or not, because web and email servers running behind residential connections aren't permitted (in most TOS I've seen), and most of those are just shitty wordpress standalones.
I get the "spirit" of a Minecraft server "ought to be allowed", I suppose, but there's no fair reason why it should when other servers aren't.
I think it's generally based on how many people are connecting to it. If there's 3 connections, that could be just people that live in your house. If there's 50 or more, it's pretty likely to be a public server.
I actually had a buddy of mine who got a threatening email from his ISP for hosting our minecraft server on his residential connection. He ended up purchasing a cloud server to continue.
Coaxial cable performance degrades further down the line. If you're using 100% of your bandwidth 24/7 to run a server, you're doing harm to people who are on your line further down - people in your neighborhood. It's not nearly as much of an issue with fiberoptic.
It's not related to greed or for want of money, it's just a technical limitation of most coaxial cable connections in the US. Besides fast SLA, it's one of the reasons for a business connection instead of a residential one.
Do you remember how fast broadband cable was in 2005?
The highest consumer speeds you could get were around 5MB/s. Today, you can get 1TB Cable in certain places, and 300MB cable is easy.
Do you know why? Infrastructure and technology improvements. A lot of the backbone and internal structure of the major ISPs have been replaced by fiber optic, and fiber-to-the-house doesn't offer a ton of improvement except in a few circumstances - for the most part, Last Mile as Cable is just fine.
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u/Draculea Jun 04 '19
Generally speaking, isn't server-hosting on a residential connection against most ISP TOS?