I always viewed self-hosting as "shades of gray." The person running Wordpress on a VPS or EC2 instance, as opposed to Wordpress.com, is self-hosting. They have

I always viewed self-hosting as "shades of gray." The person running Wordpress on a VPS or EC2 instance, as opposed to Wordpress.com, is self-hosting. They have to configure the software. The person running it on a bare metal server in his basement, even more so: both software and hardware. They still both qualify, one is just more extreme.