https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
I’ve been using Vitelity (paid) but Twilio is a bit cheaper and has a better API. However, the more obnoxious confirmation code senders can detect all of these as being in data centers. IME it’s only a few senders that are snotty about that. You could always get a burner phone.
Hmm, I don’t know what happens if you get a mobile burner phone, set up call forwarding to your VOIP number, then throw the burner phone away (i.e. shut it off so you don’t have to keep it powered and broadcasting its location). The cheapest mobile plan that I know of ($30/year redpocket) unfortunately went up to $45 a few months ago, but it gets you a usable backup sim.
Added: 1) r/nocontract on reddit showed a $36/year infimobile plan with a 20% off coupon (so a little under $30/y) on amazon. Similar deal to redpocket I think. 2) Another idea: get cheap mobile plan, port number into a voip provider, cancel mobile plan. I wonder if the number then reports as data center terminated.
There are now starting to be a few “free” mobile providers where you are required to keep a spyware app running. I don’t think I’d bother with those. textnow.com is the one I remember but there were others. textnow does NOT support call forwarding on free plans.
What does this question even mean (no I don’t want to listen to a podcast to find out)?
Sometimes I think people have been using the term “self-hosted” to mean what we used to call a home PC. I have always thought of a hosted computer (whether self-hosted or hosted by a company) as meaning a server which normally would live in a data center, and sometimes even means a rented box or VPS on which you self-host by installing and managing the software yourself (as opposed to using managed hosting or cloud services). Of course if you have good enough internet, you can self-host a server at home, but the considerations are otherwise about the same. I.e. it would usually not also be your workstation or gaming box.
So what is it that your friends are going to do with the machine? That would be pretty important in figuring out how to prepare it.