6 ms·

I deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depen

by teddyh 1y ago

I deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. If you cannot reasonably quickly access your hardware physically, like inserting or replacing an add-on card, you are not “self-hosting”. EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘self-drive’ my own car! (By which I mean that I employ an agency to provide a driver to drive a car for me, which I rent!)” or “I self-grow and self-harvest all my own food! By which I mean that I pay a farmer to grow food and harvest it for me.” Words have meaning. (Further: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21240357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21240357>)

rpdillon 1y ago
What do you call what the author is doing?
- teddyh 1y ago
  It would be good if there was a nice, simple, positive word for it; people might not feel the need to appropriate “self-host” otherwise. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    I asked because I used the term self-host for both my services that I run on a VPS I rent from Dreamhost, as well as services that I host on my homelab and expose over tailscale. I don't have a good set of terminology to differentiate between the two, so I call both of them self-hosting. I was a bit surprised you felt so strongly about it.
- walterbell 1y ago
  Self-admin
- pessimizer 1y ago
  The same thing that somebody who clicked "install wordpress" in cPANEL did. They're installing software on a rented server hosted by a company that they rent from.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    It would also include the situation where there was a bare metal server you installed your own operating system on it and then wrote your own software and then deployed it to that server. The argument being made is that's not self-hosting. That makes me wonder what it should be called.
herpdyderp 1y ago
I think this application of the term still makes sense. There are several services I use that I can "self host" for free or pay for the service's "cloud" option. Whether I "self host" on my own hardware or not isn't relevant to the term in that use case.
pdav 1y ago
I think I actually agree with you but the modern definition of the term is more akin to "I own my data" than "I own my own hardware." It's a big tent and it's nice to see people taking an interest in ownership!
- teddyh 1y ago
  I have seen the term “data sovereignty” used occasionally.
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
If you haven't picked together the hardware for your home server at home, can you really say that you're self-hosting? Or if you haven't really built the components yourself, are you actually self-hosting? If you cannot reasonably quickly debug your hardware faults physically, you're not "self-hosting". It seems everyone draws the line of "self-hosting" differently. For some, "self-hosting" could be running Wordpress at DigitalOcean. For others, self-hosting means using your residential internet connection and having the hardware at home. I'm not sure one is more "correct" than the other, just different perspectives.
- teddyh 1y ago
  > [Paraphrased] Words mean different things to different people! Anyone can choose any definition they want! No, words have quite definite meanings. Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    How is tributes to lords from vassals related to communication? Oh wait, you didn't mean that meaning of the word "aid"? But words only have one meaning...
  - latexr 1y ago
    > No, words have quite definite meanings. Were that the case, “literally” would not literally mean both itself and its opposite. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally Words change meaning frequently throughout history, depending on how they are (mis)used. Or they can change meaning depending on context or part of the country/world. https://www.vox.com/2015/11/29/9806038/great-british-baking-show-pudding-biscuit https://www.vox.com/2015/11/29/9806038/great-british-baking-... Sometimes drastically. https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/kc41mu/why_do_british_people_still_use_the_word_fag_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/kc41mu/why_... > Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication. I do agree with you that it makes it harder, but communication does depend on more than just the words.
jamesbelchamber 1y ago
Real self-hosters use butterflies
dooglius 1y ago
How do you define it? If your ISP has a problem, you can't access that hardware physically, so it would seem this definition rules out anyone that doesn't control an ISP.
- teddyh 1y ago
  This is a common, but disingenuous, objection. People also don’t make their own electricity. Is therefore “self-host” an unreachable goal, which nobody can fulfill in practice? No, this would be a useless definition.
  - dooglius 1y ago
    I agree that that's a bad definition, that's my point. The question is how _you_ are defining it since your definition seems to have this problem; if you're going to complain about others' use of the term you should indicate what you think the term should mean!
  - account42 1y ago
    It's not disingenuous. Being autistic about language use is honorable when the distinction you are trying to preserve is actually valuable. It's less so when the differences aren't that big in practice because in both cases you have a lot control over the services you run but in the end are still somewhat dependent on third parties.
lordnacho 1y ago
It's a spectrum that has been illuminated by time. In the old times you had to do all these. Now you can cut this somewhere: - Power + cooling, physical security, network. (Old school LAN party) - Can you access the bare metal OS? (Hetzner/OVH bare metal) - Can you access a VM and decide what runs on it? (EC2 + associated services, K8s, etc, etc) - Can you run a function? (Lambda for example) So the meaning has wandered to something between the first and second, IMO.
- teddyh 1y ago
  The meaning has only “wandered” due to the marketing of dishonest hosting companies, and their partially self-deluded customers who want to believe the marketing in order to avoid doing the hard work of actually self-hosting.
  - lordnacho 1y ago
    I'm not so sure. Software people have a tendency towards abstraction, and often the bottom layer in their opinion of their own role is where you have OS control, without knowing much about the network and physical. Whether that's reasonable, well, I kinda liked the underlayer and thought it was part of a good education. But not everyone agrees.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  There is no such thing as "bare metal OS." Metal is hardware, and an OS is an abstraction over hardware that restricts the software's access to it.
Semaphor 1y ago
The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want. Some of it on my 2 mini servers in my living room, some (prosody and seafile) on a VPS. Calling the latter not self hosted seems weird to me.
- latexr 1y ago
  > The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want. That seems a bit vague. If you tell that to someone who never heard of self-hosting, they’d be excused for wondering if that means downloading from an App Store and opening the settings.
  - Semaphor 1y ago
    I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;) Though I guess I missed "on a server"
    - latexr 1y ago
      > I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;) Fair! Not everyone on HN is a programmer, but there is overrepresentation. > Though I guess I missed "on a server" Yes, that’s what I was thinking was missing.
    - 47282847 1y ago
      A phone can be a great “server“ too.
turtlebits 1y ago
The word "host" is ambigious. Hosts can be virtual or physical. Self-host to me is a verb, which mean you're running the service, regardless of what hardware it's on. On-prem is better descriptive word for physical hardware.
QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
I rent a couple of bare-metal servers from Hetzner, and I have physical servers at home. On my home hardware I keep things like multiple copies of my photos and documents, as well as experimenting a bit with open LLMs etc. On the rented servers, I host websites, PeerTube, Forgejo, and keep copies of some data I downloaded from elsewhere. I’ve also previously hosted email on rented servers. Both on rented hardware and on rented VPSes. For the past few years I haven’t bothered with hosting email myself. I use iCloud provided email instead. Sometimes I upload videos to my PeerTube instance. Sometimes I upload videos to TikTok. I don’t have some grand vision of self-hosting everything at home. It is impractical, and comes with its own set of drawbacks. Things that only serve myself and my family go on my hardware at home. Things that I want others to be able to reach go on the rented servers. And other times like with email and TikTok I use services where I have no control whatsoever over what the service provider does with my data. If someone decides that a particular service is neat to host on rented servers I won’t fault them for it. And I consider things that you manage on your own to be self-hosted even if you don’t own the hardware it’s running on. You decided to rent a $5 VPS for your email? You’ll still learn things from that even if the server is not in your home. And I will perfectly agree that it fits the name self-hosted email. Same goes for anything else you set up and manage, regardless of whether it’s running on bare metal or in a VPS, and regardless of whether the computer it runs on is in your home or rented from someone else.
- teddyh 1y ago
  > If someone decides that a particular service is neat to host on rented servers I won’t fault them for it. Neither will I. It is an endeavor worthy of praise. > And I consider things that you manage on your own to be self-hosted even if you don’t own the hardware it’s running on. This is where I will disagree and stand fast. If you do not “host” it yourself, you are not “self-hosting”. You might be maintaining it. You might be administrating it. But you are not hosting it. > You decided to rent a $5 VPS for your email? You’ll still learn things from that even if the server is not in your home. I agree, and it is certainly something I wish that more people would attempt. > And I will perfectly agree that it fits the name self-hosted email. It may be said to be “self-administrated” or “self-maintained”. But it is not “self-hosted”.
tallanvor 1y ago
If I self-host at home and my internet connection goes down so I can't access anything remotely, then I'm still SOL until I can get home. And millions of people are stuck with crappy upload speeds that make plenty of services that they may want to self-host nonviable if they care about being able to access it from anywhere. Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hosting.
- teddyh 1y ago
  What you describe is an unfortunate result of the terrible bandwith situation at your (and others’) location. It is not, however, a compelling argument to redefine a term to suit your liking. (Also, with 4G, 5G, and satellite-based Internet, an alternate (albeit low-bandwith) route for emergency access is fairly straightforward to set up.)
  - tallanvor 1y ago
    Sorry, but nobody chose you as the arbiter of terminology. You can call your option home-hosting if you'd like, but we'll keep considering our scenarios to be self-hosting.
- belorn 1y ago
  Reminds me of self sufficiency farming. If you grow your own food you will be impacted by the yield of that farm, rather than going to the supermarket and buy the food there. If the soil is bad then it might be difficult to impossible to do self sufficiency farming.
FabCH 1y ago
There is a middle ground there. I self-host, was not at all affected today nor would I be if Google, MS, Cloudfare or any of the big ones go down. But I cannot easily access my server because it is locked in a datacenter 1000 km away. But it is a bare metal server from Hetzner auction that I got for cheap and it now hosts an entire family&friends cloud for 10-ish people.
pessimizer 1y ago
A host is someone who lets people stay in their house. "Self-hosting" and "bare-metal" have gotten debased in such a strange, commercial-marketing aligned way. The new definition of "self-hosting" is that you play any part in a piece of software that you use (if I click the "install wordpress button in cPANEL, am I self-hosting?), and the new definition of "bare-metal" is "computer." It's just weird. How can you employ a webhost in order to self-host? How can it be bare-metal if it's hosted within an OS that completely abstracts the hardware? I suspect non-technical people just wanted to fluff their qualifications, and the companies who host for them wanted to help.
- account42 1y ago
  If you throw a party in your rental apartment you are not a host? I guess you could even claim that renting means you do not actually have a home if you want to be really pedantic. Perhaps you care about qualifications, but others just care about being in control of the servers they depend on and having options when the providers helping to run those servers become unreliable and choosing the most cost-effective option to achieve that. Unless you have an actual argument why the distinction matters besides "it allows the plebes to play" then few will care about what you think the term "self-hosted" should mean - even more so when you yourself still depend on your ISP and power company.
pluto_modadic 1y ago
self-hosting: running open source code that you could run on any computer. if it's convenient to run mastodon on hetzner, that's STILL self hosting; because you /can/ move your app IN ITS ENTIRETY from any computer to any other. HomeLab elites really are the most insufferable people out there.
- ThatPlayer 1y ago
  It doesn't have to be open source. Plex is probably the most popular example of that. MongoDB is also no longer generally considered open source.
AndyMcConachie 1y ago
I rent VPS's in a data center and run services on them. I feel like I'm self-hosting. The days of me running a server in my own home are long gone. I don't want to deal with the power requirements, the noise, or the hardware. I'm responsible for all the software that runs on them so I consider it self hosting.
Gud 1y ago
As someone who self hosts in a VPN, I agree with you. :-) I did self host on my own hardware for a long, long time. But convenience won. I had built myself a massive beast. A Xeon board I had purchased cheaply for $200 bucks from a friend. I put a water cooler(OEM from Intel) and clocked that sob from 2.6GHz to 4GHz. I quickly clocked it down back to 2.6GHz. It never hit temperatures above 30 again. I installed 24GB RAM, which was the maximum. I installed it in a 3U chassi with the max possible 3.5” hot swap slots. I think 16? I used FreeBSD with ZFS to run a bhyve virtualisation platform. It was a lot of fun.
lpln3452 1y ago
Some may lament that 'writing' now includes typing, despite having been limited to pen and paper. Frankly it's doubtful that point is taken seriously. Similarly the core of your 'self-farming' analogy is the direct management of the crops. The involvement of others in demolishing existing structures, erecting fences, or managing water resources on the land is of little consequence. Of course, some might argue that unless the farm is directly managed, it does not constitute self-farming.
watermelon0 1y ago
Not sure if it's the best source, but Wikipedia says: > Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of the administrator's own control. > The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines.
senectus1 1y ago
completely agree, though it depends on why you self host.
cakeday 1y ago
> In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. Zero here. > If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. Minor dependency on OCI but no down time at all for any services I run.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
Self hosting does not, and never did, mean solely running a physical server yourself. It means that you are running the services from a server you control. That can be a physical server, but a VPS fits the bill just fine. You're correct that terms have meanings, but this term has never meant what you're trying to constrain it to.
account42 1y ago
But are you really self hosting if you don't build your server silicon from first principles :) I think in your analogy a VPS is more like renting a (normal) car rather than buying one - you're still in control over where it goes and its up to you to obey the traffic laws but if there are any major issues that are not your fault it's up to the rental company to make sure you get a replacement. I'm curious what your goal is with your language crusade? Being precise with your language can be important when the distinction matters, but does it really matter here? > If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. What if it didn't have cloud in its name when I signed up but some marketing bozo adjusted the description since then? Did it stop being self hosting even though nothing technical about the setup changed.

by teddyh 1y ago

rpdillon 1y ago

What do you call what the author is doing?

teddyh 1y ago
It would be good if there was a nice, simple, positive word for it; people might not feel the need to appropriate “self-host” otherwise. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  I asked because I used the term self-host for both my services that I run on a VPS I rent from Dreamhost, as well as services that I host on my homelab and expose over tailscale. I don't have a good set of terminology to differentiate between the two, so I call both of them self-hosting. I was a bit surprised you felt so strongly about it.
walterbell 1y ago
Self-admin
pessimizer 1y ago
The same thing that somebody who clicked "install wordpress" in cPANEL did. They're installing software on a rented server hosted by a company that they rent from.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  It would also include the situation where there was a bare metal server you installed your own operating system on it and then wrote your own software and then deployed it to that server. The argument being made is that's not self-hosting. That makes me wonder what it should be called.

herpdyderp 1y ago

I think this application of the term still makes sense. There are several services I use that I can "self host" for free or pay for the service's "cloud" option. Whether I "self host" on my own hardware or not isn't relevant to the term in that use case.

pdav 1y ago

I think I actually agree with you but the modern definition of the term is more akin to "I own my data" than "I own my own hardware." It's a big tent and it's nice to see people taking an interest in ownership!

teddyh 1y ago
I have seen the term “data sovereignty” used occasionally.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

If you haven't picked together the hardware for your home server at home, can you really say that you're self-hosting? Or if you haven't really built the components yourself, are you actually self-hosting? If you cannot reasonably quickly debug your hardware faults physically, you're not "self-hosting". It seems everyone draws the line of "self-hosting" differently. For some, "self-hosting" could be running Wordpress at DigitalOcean. For others, self-hosting means using your residential internet connection and having the hardware at home. I'm not sure one is more "correct" than the other, just different perspectives.

teddyh 1y ago
> [Paraphrased] Words mean different things to different people! Anyone can choose any definition they want! No, words have quite definite meanings. Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  How is tributes to lords from vassals related to communication? Oh wait, you didn't mean that meaning of the word "aid"? But words only have one meaning...
- latexr 1y ago
  > No, words have quite definite meanings. Were that the case, “literally” would not literally mean both itself and its opposite. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally Words change meaning frequently throughout history, depending on how they are (mis)used. Or they can change meaning depending on context or part of the country/world. https://www.vox.com/2015/11/29/9806038/great-british-baking-show-pudding-biscuit https://www.vox.com/2015/11/29/9806038/great-british-baking-... Sometimes drastically. https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/kc41mu/why_do_british_people_still_use_the_word_fag_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/kc41mu/why_... > Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication. I do agree with you that it makes it harder, but communication does depend on more than just the words.

jamesbelchamber 1y ago

Real self-hosters use butterflies

dooglius 1y ago

How do you define it? If your ISP has a problem, you can't access that hardware physically, so it would seem this definition rules out anyone that doesn't control an ISP.

teddyh 1y ago
This is a common, but disingenuous, objection. People also don’t make their own electricity. Is therefore “self-host” an unreachable goal, which nobody can fulfill in practice? No, this would be a useless definition.
- dooglius 1y ago
  I agree that that's a bad definition, that's my point. The question is how _you_ are defining it since your definition seems to have this problem; if you're going to complain about others' use of the term you should indicate what you think the term should mean!
- account42 1y ago
  It's not disingenuous. Being autistic about language use is honorable when the distinction you are trying to preserve is actually valuable. It's less so when the differences aren't that big in practice because in both cases you have a lot control over the services you run but in the end are still somewhat dependent on third parties.

lordnacho 1y ago

It's a spectrum that has been illuminated by time. In the old times you had to do all these. Now you can cut this somewhere: - Power + cooling, physical security, network. (Old school LAN party) - Can you access the bare metal OS? (Hetzner/OVH bare metal) - Can you access a VM and decide what runs on it? (EC2 + associated services, K8s, etc, etc) - Can you run a function? (Lambda for example) So the meaning has wandered to something between the first and second, IMO.

teddyh 1y ago
The meaning has only “wandered” due to the marketing of dishonest hosting companies, and their partially self-deluded customers who want to believe the marketing in order to avoid doing the hard work of actually self-hosting.
- lordnacho 1y ago
  I'm not so sure. Software people have a tendency towards abstraction, and often the bottom layer in their opinion of their own role is where you have OS control, without knowing much about the network and physical. Whether that's reasonable, well, I kinda liked the underlayer and thought it was part of a good education. But not everyone agrees.
pessimizer 1y ago
There is no such thing as "bare metal OS." Metal is hardware, and an OS is an abstraction over hardware that restricts the software's access to it.

Semaphor 1y ago

The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want. Some of it on my 2 mini servers in my living room, some (prosody and seafile) on a VPS. Calling the latter not self hosted seems weird to me.

latexr 1y ago
> The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want. That seems a bit vague. If you tell that to someone who never heard of self-hosting, they’d be excused for wondering if that means downloading from an App Store and opening the settings.
- Semaphor 1y ago
  I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;) Though I guess I missed "on a server"
  - latexr 1y ago
    > I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;) Fair! Not everyone on HN is a programmer, but there is overrepresentation. > Though I guess I missed "on a server" Yes, that’s what I was thinking was missing.
  - 47282847 1y ago
    A phone can be a great “server“ too.

turtlebits 1y ago

The word "host" is ambigious. Hosts can be virtual or physical. Self-host to me is a verb, which mean you're running the service, regardless of what hardware it's on. On-prem is better descriptive word for physical hardware.

QuantumNomad_ 1y ago

I rent a couple of bare-metal servers from Hetzner, and I have physical servers at home. On my home hardware I keep things like multiple copies of my photos and documents, as well as experimenting a bit with open LLMs etc. On the rented servers, I host websites, PeerTube, Forgejo, and keep copies of some data I downloaded from elsewhere. I’ve also previously hosted email on rented servers. Both on rented hardware and on rented VPSes. For the past few years I haven’t bothered with hosting email myself. I use iCloud provided email instead. Sometimes I upload videos to my PeerTube instance. Sometimes I upload videos to TikTok. I don’t have some grand vision of self-hosting everything at home. It is impractical, and comes with its own set of drawbacks. Things that only serve myself and my family go on my hardware at home. Things that I want others to be able to reach go on the rented servers. And other times like with email and TikTok I use services where I have no control whatsoever over what the service provider does with my data. If someone decides that a particular service is neat to host on rented servers I won’t fault them for it. And I consider things that you manage on your own to be self-hosted even if you don’t own the hardware it’s running on. You decided to rent a $5 VPS for your email? You’ll still learn things from that even if the server is not in your home. And I will perfectly agree that it fits the name self-hosted email. Same goes for anything else you set up and manage, regardless of whether it’s running on bare metal or in a VPS, and regardless of whether the computer it runs on is in your home or rented from someone else.

teddyh 1y ago
> If someone decides that a particular service is neat to host on rented servers I won’t fault them for it. Neither will I. It is an endeavor worthy of praise. > And I consider things that you manage on your own to be self-hosted even if you don’t own the hardware it’s running on. This is where I will disagree and stand fast. If you do not “host” it yourself, you are not “self-hosting”. You might be maintaining it. You might be administrating it. But you are not hosting it. > You decided to rent a $5 VPS for your email? You’ll still learn things from that even if the server is not in your home. I agree, and it is certainly something I wish that more people would attempt. > And I will perfectly agree that it fits the name self-hosted email. It may be said to be “self-administrated” or “self-maintained”. But it is not “self-hosted”.

tallanvor 1y ago

If I self-host at home and my internet connection goes down so I can't access anything remotely, then I'm still SOL until I can get home. And millions of people are stuck with crappy upload speeds that make plenty of services that they may want to self-host nonviable if they care about being able to access it from anywhere. Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hosting.

teddyh 1y ago
What you describe is an unfortunate result of the terrible bandwith situation at your (and others’) location. It is not, however, a compelling argument to redefine a term to suit your liking. (Also, with 4G, 5G, and satellite-based Internet, an alternate (albeit low-bandwith) route for emergency access is fairly straightforward to set up.)
- tallanvor 1y ago
  Sorry, but nobody chose you as the arbiter of terminology. You can call your option home-hosting if you'd like, but we'll keep considering our scenarios to be self-hosting.
belorn 1y ago
Reminds me of self sufficiency farming. If you grow your own food you will be impacted by the yield of that farm, rather than going to the supermarket and buy the food there. If the soil is bad then it might be difficult to impossible to do self sufficiency farming.

FabCH 1y ago

There is a middle ground there. I self-host, was not at all affected today nor would I be if Google, MS, Cloudfare or any of the big ones go down. But I cannot easily access my server because it is locked in a datacenter 1000 km away. But it is a bare metal server from Hetzner auction that I got for cheap and it now hosts an entire family&friends cloud for 10-ish people.

pessimizer 1y ago

A host is someone who lets people stay in their house. "Self-hosting" and "bare-metal" have gotten debased in such a strange, commercial-marketing aligned way. The new definition of "self-hosting" is that you play any part in a piece of software that you use (if I click the "install wordpress button in cPANEL, am I self-hosting?), and the new definition of "bare-metal" is "computer." It's just weird. How can you employ a webhost in order to self-host? How can it be bare-metal if it's hosted within an OS that completely abstracts the hardware? I suspect non-technical people just wanted to fluff their qualifications, and the companies who host for them wanted to help.

account42 1y ago
If you throw a party in your rental apartment you are not a host? I guess you could even claim that renting means you do not actually have a home if you want to be really pedantic. Perhaps you care about qualifications, but others just care about being in control of the servers they depend on and having options when the providers helping to run those servers become unreliable and choosing the most cost-effective option to achieve that. Unless you have an actual argument why the distinction matters besides "it allows the plebes to play" then few will care about what you think the term "self-hosted" should mean - even more so when you yourself still depend on your ISP and power company.

pluto_modadic 1y ago

self-hosting: running open source code that you could run on any computer. if it's convenient to run mastodon on hetzner, that's STILL self hosting; because you /can/ move your app IN ITS ENTIRETY from any computer to any other. HomeLab elites really are the most insufferable people out there.

ThatPlayer 1y ago
It doesn't have to be open source. Plex is probably the most popular example of that. MongoDB is also no longer generally considered open source.

AndyMcConachie 1y ago

I rent VPS's in a data center and run services on them. I feel like I'm self-hosting. The days of me running a server in my own home are long gone. I don't want to deal with the power requirements, the noise, or the hardware. I'm responsible for all the software that runs on them so I consider it self hosting.

Gud 1y ago

As someone who self hosts in a VPN, I agree with you. :-) I did self host on my own hardware for a long, long time. But convenience won. I had built myself a massive beast. A Xeon board I had purchased cheaply for $200 bucks from a friend. I put a water cooler(OEM from Intel) and clocked that sob from 2.6GHz to 4GHz. I quickly clocked it down back to 2.6GHz. It never hit temperatures above 30 again. I installed 24GB RAM, which was the maximum. I installed it in a 3U chassi with the max possible 3.5” hot swap slots. I think 16? I used FreeBSD with ZFS to run a bhyve virtualisation platform. It was a lot of fun.

lpln3452 1y ago

Some may lament that 'writing' now includes typing, despite having been limited to pen and paper. Frankly it's doubtful that point is taken seriously. Similarly the core of your 'self-farming' analogy is the direct management of the crops. The involvement of others in demolishing existing structures, erecting fences, or managing water resources on the land is of little consequence. Of course, some might argue that unless the farm is directly managed, it does not constitute self-farming.

watermelon0 1y ago

Not sure if it's the best source, but Wikipedia says: > Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of the administrator's own control. > The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines.

senectus1 1y ago

completely agree, though it depends on why you self host.

cakeday 1y ago

> In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. Zero here. > If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. Minor dependency on OCI but no down time at all for any services I run.

bigstrat2003 1y ago

Self hosting does not, and never did, mean solely running a physical server yourself. It means that you are running the services from a server you control. That can be a physical server, but a VPS fits the bill just fine. You're correct that terms have meanings, but this term has never meant what you're trying to constrain it to.

account42 1y ago

But are you really self hosting if you don't build your server silicon from first principles :) I think in your analogy a VPS is more like renting a (normal) car rather than buying one - you're still in control over where it goes and its up to you to obey the traffic laws but if there are any major issues that are not your fault it's up to the rental company to make sure you get a replacement. I'm curious what your goal is with your language crusade? Being precise with your language can be important when the distinction matters, but does it really matter here? > If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. What if it didn't have cloud in its name when I signed up but some marketing bozo adjusted the description since then? Did it stop being self hosting even though nothing technical about the setup changed.