Back in 2009, anynone with a Nokia could have a personal website running on their own phone. Sadly this amazing piece of tech was never widely adopted. Today’s phone are far more powerful than those Nokias both in performance and battery backup and still we don’t see anyone running a server on their phone. Why?
I think this was never implemented on phones because there’s no incentive for large corporations to work on something like this.
The end user experience for your website would be terrible and inconsistent, phones don’t have the kind of uptime and availability that you would need, and keeping them plugged in 24/7 in a closet doing computational tasks is a good way to end up with battery bulge and one spicy mini pillow.
There are too many nefarious purposes that could benefit from being able to serve public web services from your smartphone and no consumer benefits that average people would care about.
Fortunately it doesn’t matter what I want to allow and is up to the cellular service providers which have all kinds of stipulations about what constitutes as service abuse and using an inordinate amount of bandwidth is usually one of them.
So for security safety and service stability reasons, yeah, there is no legitimate reason why it SHOULD be allowed. Just spend the $5 monthly on the hardware and bandwidth instead of potentially making your neighbors cell data worse or setting your house on fire/ blowing up your closet just so you can have an unconventional web server.
The internet is a massive hodge-podge of different devices. There’s literally no difference in how it’s done now already. Walking through my datacenter I see 10th gen dells still in service.
For homelab? or setting up a personal lemmy instance? It really depends on the purpose. And the premise from the OP has been “personal”.
Many phones do “only charge to 80%” sort of setting. Negates this nearly completely.
Phones can connect to other services you know… It’s not all about cellular. And many phone companies suppose home/business connections over their network.
There’s tons of legitimate reasons… Such as I want to do what I want with my device.