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Quick Question: Why is self-hosted a thing that's highly desirable on HN?

jedberg 6y ago
Control. With self hosting I can control the code, what it does, the cost, where it stores data, how backups are made, etc. It’s always a trade off on control, and my comfort point is “on AWS”. For some people they want their own servers. Some people want to own the network block. It’s just what level of comfort you have with each type of control.
- Fiveplus 6y ago
  Cool, thanks for expanding on that man.
- m11a 6y ago
  Isn't there a downside here? What if your content doesn't have enough views / you get bored / life changes so can't afford server costs anymore / die. Your server will expire eventually, and there goes your content. web.archive.org might have some sites archived, but many blogs won't have been archived so their content is just gone forever. I've self-hosted many platforms, and many have died, perhaps due to running costs or lack of need anymore. It's partially why I'd never self-host my email, for example. You can't know the future, and if your content is gone, it's gone for all of your audience (or potential future audience). Perhaps an ideal solution is some kind of self-hosted platform that mirrors content into a forever-public external repository, and hence preserves it, even if your hosting ceases to exist.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    Yeah. There's a wordpress.com blog I frequently go back to and reference and the author passed away in 2014. Thanks to it being hosted on wordpress.com it will stay up there for the foreseeable future. Had it been relying on monthly payments for hosting and yearly payments for the domain it would probably have been down already by the time I realized he was no longer with us (some three months after the fact). And at that point, not all content would've probably been in archive.org and thus lost forever. I also have a bunch of old blogs that I've just given up on at some point and now they're gone forever. Your last point is kind of what archive.org's Wayback Machine does. Haven't checked whether they have an API where you can submit URL's you publish* or if you'd have to submit new posts manually, but this could be a decent solution. It wouldn't cover non-tech people though. *) I just now quickly browsed through their API doc but couldn't find anything clear, other than uploading random files
pacifika 6y ago
You're not dependant on the service, when it goes away or gets bought.

Control. With self hosting I can control the code, what it does, the cost, where it stores data, how backups are made, etc. It’s always a trade off on control, and my comfort point is “on AWS”. For some people they want their own servers. Some people want to own the network block. It’s just what level of comfort you have with each type of control.

Fiveplus 6y ago
Cool, thanks for expanding on that man.
m11a 6y ago
Isn't there a downside here? What if your content doesn't have enough views / you get bored / life changes so can't afford server costs anymore / die. Your server will expire eventually, and there goes your content. web.archive.org might have some sites archived, but many blogs won't have been archived so their content is just gone forever. I've self-hosted many platforms, and many have died, perhaps due to running costs or lack of need anymore. It's partially why I'd never self-host my email, for example. You can't know the future, and if your content is gone, it's gone for all of your audience (or potential future audience). Perhaps an ideal solution is some kind of self-hosted platform that mirrors content into a forever-public external repository, and hence preserves it, even if your hosting ceases to exist.
- spurgu 6y ago
  Yeah. There's a wordpress.com blog I frequently go back to and reference and the author passed away in 2014. Thanks to it being hosted on wordpress.com it will stay up there for the foreseeable future. Had it been relying on monthly payments for hosting and yearly payments for the domain it would probably have been down already by the time I realized he was no longer with us (some three months after the fact). And at that point, not all content would've probably been in archive.org and thus lost forever. I also have a bunch of old blogs that I've just given up on at some point and now they're gone forever. Your last point is kind of what archive.org's Wayback Machine does. Haven't checked whether they have an API where you can submit URL's you publish* or if you'd have to submit new posts manually, but this could be a decent solution. It wouldn't cover non-tech people though. *) I just now quickly browsed through their API doc but couldn't find anything clear, other than uploading random files

pacifika 6y ago

You're not dependant on the service, when it goes away or gets bought.