Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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This feels like a bad faith argument. If the internet goes down, I will be able to access my servers and my data by simply going home. If those services were hosted in the cloud, I wouldn't not be able to access my data at all. Obviously one is better than the other.
Except one benefit of the datacenter is redundancy : it going offline is way less likely than your home Internet (or anything else it depends on) going down.
Sure, but if stuff goes really south, I can still access the stuff on my hardware from my home. If stuff goes down, I cannot access the stuff in data centers, period. There's positives and negatives either way, but imo owning your shit is a huge positive.
Do you really access your data most often from home than remotely ?
That's not really the point I'm trying to make, I'm not sure where this disconnect is coming from.
The question you should be asking is whether or not I can more easily access my home than a data center, to which the answer would be yes.
If the entire world disappeared aside from the plot of land I live on, well, I'd have larger issues, but I would still be able to access my data, until the generator ran out of gas of course.
To answer the question you did ask that, again, is not relevant to the point I'm trying to make, is yes. I work from home, and live in America where we don't have third places, so I do most often access my data from home. Additionally, most of the services I self host are home automation and data backup based. Sure, I wouldn't be able to access Immich or Home Assistant while away from home, which would be annoying, but the end of the world? Not really. A lot of people intentionally don't make their HA/Immich instances visible to the internet.
The logic seemed sound to me. If you have to go home to access then you are no longer hosting it if hosting means to serve to the outside. If you are dependent on an ISP or power company to host then an argument can be made that either youre not self hosting or that self hosting allows the inclusion of a third party. If you are giving a pass to include a third party, then having a cloud provider could be seen as a third party to self hosting.
If making the service accessible from the outside is not a consideration for self hosting, then is running a desktop application considered to be self hosting if youre sitting at the computer it's running on?
I'm not sure what the disconnect is here. In both scenarios I'm reliant on an ISP. In the scenario where it's on a data center, if my internet goes down or the data center goes down, I am shit out of luck. I am not capable of accessing my data. If it's hosted at my house, I still have the ability to go home and access my stuff. One seems much better than the other to me. It's the difference between being able to access your stuff and not.
There are definitely positives to both, but having physical access to my own hardware that contains my own data is a huge positive to me.
I have a raspberry pi I keep at my mom's house and it's completely managed by me. We live in different states. Would you classify the services on it as self hosted or no? I do not have immediate access to the physical hardware, I am at the mercy of my mom's power and internet. When it's all working I can access my services and data on it. Is she hosting or am I hosting it from her place?
If I rent rack space and install my servers in a data center and have physical access and ownership of the server but not the data center infrastructure. Am I hosting or is the data center hosting?
My point is that "self hosting" seems to have many different forms and there must be some minimal classification that allows inclusion without being overly strict.
For the record I practice all forms with servers at home and elsewhere.
You can still go to your mom's house and get your data, unlike if you're renting a VM.
I'm also completely not arguing that renting a VM isn't self hosting, I'm certain I've said nothing of the sort, I'm just arguing that it's worse than owning your hardware and therefor data.
Conclussion first: In any case, I would agree with what some other used said: What we care about in here, for the most part, is the software element of it. Even if I personally don't consider using Cl*udflare to be self-hosting, all of us have similar info sharing interests, so this is just a terminology argument that does not really impact us that much
I wrote this first: Actually, this is a pretty interesting thing to think about. To me, the key factor to distinguish what is hosting and what is not is the use of a server. I would say that internet connection is not a requirement for hosting, otherwise it seems absurd to deny that the servers of big LAN parties like the Euskal Encounter are not hosting anything, they clearly are. Down to the smaller scale, having a LAN only Minecraft server in your home server, I would say it still is hosting, even if only you and your family use it. Now, going to a non dedicated computer that is exposing it on LAN, is it self-hosting? I would say no, just because it also seems absurd that any single player world opening in LAN to enable admin suddenly is self-hosting, I say it is not.
But I guess this shows that there is a point where we need more specific definitions, there is some ambiguity.
A summary of my definition attempt: