Self hosting is great. The examples in this article are not exactly shining examples: an API that shows your Spotify stats?
If we’re going to talk about self hosting music, I’d like to mention Roon, which is loved by audiophiles. It aims at creating a magazine like experience for navigating and discovering music. Been using it since COVID and it’s completely transformed my experience of listening to something else than the same playlist over and over.
Thanks for the tip! I run these things mostly for fun - the Spotify stats thing isn't super useful, but it is fun to look at how my listening habits have changed over the years.
It slightly more than just an API though: one can't aggregate directly from the Spotify API.
I like listening to the same playlist over an over.
Magazine for music? I would like to have time for magazines. But it would be about electronic and RC-models.
You can self host a server on your machine, and buy a license for it. Not all software you run on your own machine has to be open source. See: Plex for example.
I'm not super familiar, but it looks like you're subscribing to Roon's metadata but it's "bring your own music" (to quote their FAQ) which can be files you self-host and/or supported music streaming services (which don't include Roon) that you subscribe to separately.
There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want to use it by pointing my browser at a machine name (of another device I own) and port number, rather than by launching a dedicated program?
Most people have many devices: phones, tablets, laptops, etc... so this makes that stuff accessible from anywhere. And if you lose your device, or it dies, you don't lose all your data. On that note: self-hosting allows you to centralize your backups.
It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync.
And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for long enough (or using it for anything critical enough) to really worry about how to achieve "centralized backups". I'd rather not transmit that data over the Internet when I could just connect the laptop physically to my backup storage when I got home.
> It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS
Not even listening to music in the car? That is probably my #1 phone use case by far outside of the communications functions you mentioned. I run a Navidrome server at home, and while on the go my phone can stream any music I like from the home server (so I don't need to load it in advance). In theory one might store the music on one's phone of course, but I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.
I generally prefer to have access to all my senses on public transit, but there are any number of other portable devices I could use that store the music locally.
> I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.
If I were going to choose from among that much music I might as well search the Internet anyway. An entry-level microSD the size of my thumbnail now holds a couple hundred CDs worth (at uncompressed CD quality; several times that for high-quality opus).
You seem to be an extreme outlier and probably not the target audience for such applications. No offense, but nobody is carrying around multiple devices when the one device we all have can do everything and do it better.
MP3s are tiny. Just download + cache the n and n+1 song. On a modern 4g or 5g connection downloading an entire song takes seconds. Anytime a new song starts up, grab the n+1 song as soon as possible.
But aside from that, inside any metro area even a 200ms or so buffer would likely suffice for streaming music.
Yep, and OPUS files are even lighter. That's why I just sync a "currently listening" music folder with Syncthing and do not think about connection, caching and all that. (I have the rest reachable when I need it, of course.)
200ms and even n+1 won't cut it for a subway, a semi-basement pub, a tunnel, a train or an airplane trip, a hike, a countryside visit, etc.
Others already answered with information that you usually have more devices then just 1. So you can have access to your data from PC, laptop and your phone.
I for once also like to have my own data my own. I.e. I have:
- my own email server
- my own files sharing service
- service for cardDav, CalDav etc.
- service for editing my own office files on mobile
I tried various Things to be able to access my own DNA while not at home and ended up using wire guard for my subnet so that I always have access to my DNA server. Right now I am solving it with mikrotiks "back to home" app., but the regular wire guard app does it as well. It uses very little battery.
You mean DLNA? Like media server? The ones I am/was using are quite wide spread.
The most popular is plex I think, but I never liked that you have to register someplace else to be access your local library, crazy notion for me.
Anyway the nginx reverse proxy is enough for those. You can login and listen to your own music or watch your movies anywhere.
Reads like a cool sci-fi story premise. Remote access to base DNA for the robotic body for person verification, or for a self-mutating or rapidly evolving organism.
A lot of the stuff we're selfhosting just.... isn't a standalone application. My mastodon server has to run always to get messages. My nexcloud has to be always on to get my phone backups.
The only thing that might make sense to be local is media, but only if you don't share with someone else and you want to maintain an offline copy of your library on each device you use.
In general, it's stuff that needs to be shared or needs to run 24/7. A lot of that just doesn't make any sense as a desktop application.
All rationalization aside, it's a hobby. It's fun. People spin up hulking enterprise gear at home and run jellyfin just for kicks. It's not supposed to be at all practical or to even make sense. It's silly nonsense on purpose.
Specifically with the Spotify service, the problem with the Spotify API is that you can only request listening data for the last 100 played songs iirc. You can manually request the data from Spotify, but it will take them a month or two to give you the data and it will be a snapshot of it.
So if you want live updates on statistics about your listening habits you need a service running 24/7 querying the Spotify API and storing the information in a database. Assumedly since most people don't have a computer to run this on 24/7, a server is necessary / preferred.
I've actually written an application doing something similar, it's very annoying that Spotify's API works like this.
> what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly?
Having access to multiple computers/devices as a single user became cheap and more common. If it was still the 2000s (or maybe early 2010s) and somebody only used a single PC for most of their tasks that'd make sense, but that's just not the reality most people live anymore
As far as I can tell, the price range for consumer PCs hasn't really moved since then. If anything it's worse now for people who expect to have a good quality graphics card. Owning a smartphone outright isn't cheap, either.
You can buy a mini pc for >$200 USD that is capable of running most desktop tasks and can also handle server tasks. Good quality integrated graphics APUs are also plentiful and fairly easy to come by these days.
I think people don't know what they want, but they like fiddling with computers. So, they imagine future scenarios where they would have problems (which they don't) and imagine solutions for those problems they don't have, and spend time implementing those solutions.
For example. Whenever RSS comes up, I say that newsboat is the best thing. People don't like it because it doesn't synchronize devices. Really? Why not have a device for reading, and read there? I have newsboat on my laptop and I A) don't have to read on my phone, B) can't read on my phone, and C) don't have to spend my free time doing unpaid maintenance for a job which I created for myself. Win-win-win.
> Why not have a device for reading, and read there?
I'm curious to know why you think this way of doing is "correct"? I like reading my RSS feeds on my phone. And on my laptop. And on my tablet, sometimes.
You do know we can infer unwritten things from context, right?
> I say that newsboat is the best thing
> Why not have a device for reading, and read there?
These sound like you believe your way of doing is the correct one and people reading on multiple devices are wrong. You don't have to say it for readers to understand it this way.
Please don't play weasel word games, you know exactly what the poster meant. Your showing an awful mindset where you scold people who don't share your preferences and world view. Stop it.
I read RSS on my desktop when I'm at home, on my work laptop when I'm at work, and on my phone in-between. And that works perfectly.
Why would I want to reduce my options?
Maybe for some. But for me I do not want giant corp own my data. Like I do give keys to my house to some company or I do not have people manage my own money. Just as a principle.
I guess there are a few reasons: easier to develop cross platform, easier to reuse for non-self hosted, easier for programmers familiar with web development to implement, less activation cost for users, less friction to use with multiple devices.
You'll need to port that to windows, linux, Mac, android, and ios for a typical device mix of someone doing self-hosting, and no access from more closed platforms that have a browser.
I can understand Linux programs not being easily made to work on Android, but I can't understand why I'd ever need or want a device that runs Android and a device that runs IOS. Unless they're test devices for development, but I wouldn't be using those to access services in my day-to-day life.
I dislike the iOS experience and have used an Android phone daily for nearly 15 years. The iPad Pro is objectively better than any Android tablet, even with the limitations of the OS.
There is always going to be a point of failure. For many of us, self-hosting on a dedicated server, VPS, or some sort of cloud service is much better than keeping the hardware to do it at home.
My stuff is spread out among a dedicated server and 3 VPS's. --I could and should drop one of the VPS's, but if it'll take me a couple of hours, it's just not worth it until I actually have the time to spare.
It depends of your needs and resources of course but you can keep in some drawer or basement some old or small PC and you basically do not have to spend money on this, but for paid servers you have to spend 20-50$/month for something sensible.
1tb of backup in some s3 service costs like 120$ per year, and 1TB is not that much. In reality paid servers will be close to 1k$/year and in that price you can have sensible machine.
Sure, I could get a server at home, but then I have to figure out how to make it quiet enough that I don't notice it while keeping it from overheating - something that's hard enough to do with the equipment I already have. And then I have to worry about what happens if somebody decides to have fun trying to DDOS something on my home connection. Again, easier to rent a dedicated server so I don't have to worry about it.
I guess it depends on your country climate, here, where I live in the basement I have steady 22-23 degrees C, so not a problem really.
Also I do not have even GPU there which is the most problematic part usually.
About DDOS, you should not your server directly connected to the internet. Use some router or managed switch first. Usually it have already some kind of protection on whatever device is connected to your internet provider infrastructure.
Another question is why would anybody DDOS you? You are not important enough.
When I bought domain and connected it to my VPS - I got almost instantly visitors (probably bots looking for new domains being registered) trying bruteforce an access. And I almost instantly blocked Root login and Password auth. They were still trying to login. So I moved the port to higher one. It was calm for few months and then they found new port and again tried to ram it down.
So I blocked IPs only to predefined set.
It was exactly the same when I opened my server to the internet with new domain. From that point of view it does not matter if this is your machine, VPS or dedicated server on some rack somewhere. You are responsible for its security.
When I read that someone disable password login (rightfully so), then they take additional steps to stop some bots to randomly brute force them with a password…
You can always "do more" yourself. I think we all can agree that it would not be reasonable to build your own server (including) from first principles so it's always a question of where you want to draw the line. IMO what matters is how much you influence the end result and how well you are equipped to deal with bs from those your solution depends on. A VPS just means you let someone else deal with hardware issues but are still fully controlling the software - and the interface between the two is a relatively standard virtual machine which makes it easy to migrate elsewhere when the provider decides to sequeeze you.
I didn't realize, but apparently this is a long-standing argument. I did just a tiny bit of digging because I'm sort of into self-hosting and I ran across the selfhosted Reddit's wiki on the topic.
Basically it sounds like IaaS is fine (even though someone else manages the hardware and restricts OS choices), and even PaaS is fine (even though someone else manages the hardware, the OS, and the configuration of interpreters such as php / node.js / python / etc.), since these let you run your own code (which can include your instance of community code). Only SaaS would be excluded, as these don't let you run your own code.
Something pikapods looked neat at first then soon I realised the costs add up and add up a lot. One day I was calculating it at pikapods at I realised I had crossed 27 USD/m and I wasn't even finished. Like those streaming services - everything on a new streaming service i.e a new pod and they cost separately. I wish there was a service which would take away the pain of installation and maintenance away from me but let me host a lot of absolutely single user (i.e. only I'd access that of course) and as light weight as it can get and as low in usage at it gets on one single "pod" or "instance" or "box" and charge for that. Also, it's not a pikapods or pikapods' problem, it's a general problem I believe.
I will say, Pikapods is really nice because they give a cut back to the developers of Open Source. I'm the maintainer of Kavita, a popular self-hosted reading server and pikapods gives me something like 10-15% cut of each user running Kavita.
My comment was not on integrity of pikapods or their functioning. Rather how even such a setup results in costs adding up and that could be a net negative to self hosting.
PS. Your app's name kavita - does it mean poem/poetry or it means something else?
I've taken this one step further: I self-host archivebox which is basically a self-hosted wayback machine. That way my bookmarks are immune to articles being taken down / moved / modified.
I'd love to colocate some hardware but all the options near me (Sydney, Australia) are insanely expensive for no reason, how do you go about finding affordable rackspace?
Ship it to the next best DC in a foreign country. Iceland, Sweden, Austria all have great DCs and connectivity and are the best prices outside of my city. Your latency will suffer but for personal, semi-professional you end up with a fun hobby.
Buy something second hand off eBay and have it shipped directly to the DC. Most are kitted with a KVM, so you can then configure all the settings when racked. When it's time to retire they are normally happy to do so for a small fee.
Same with spare hardware, send a couple of spare drives. Make friends with the DCops team and they'll be happy to swap parts.
WebHostingTalk is another good resource for research and colo offers/self hosting [0]
One day I hope for my own /29 but with IPv4 exhaustion don't count on it. A /27 when used sensibly works well.
I don't think your options are going to have great latency to Australia - unless gp is mostly hosting things for other (worldwide) users they should keep the servers closer than that for the best experience.
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.”
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.
That seems ripe for an alternative version of the popular “loops to goat farming” quote:
> I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
Meanwhile, that person learned the valuable skills of programming loops, recording, playing, and making drums, and goat farming; I suspect they may be happier doing some of those things than making music from other people's loops, which is where they started.
I bet they met a bunch of interesting people along the way.
Very possible but if they go an tell someone using loops that they aren't really making music they'd still be an asshole.
Managing your own hardware can be fun and rewarding but it isn't actually required for the original goal of regaining control over your digital life. And it's not like if you start with a VPS you can never move to your own hardware in case you find building on someone else's service too limiting.
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.
Good example of words losing their meaning. “Enshittification” is barely an infant as a word and it has a very specific meaning, but people are already using to mean “something I dislike”.
Read the link and follow the definition. The “figurative”, “for emphasis” usage of literally was officially added to dictionaries, meaning it is official it means that, whether we like it or not. Whenever you tell people they are wrong for that usage of “literally”, you are now the wrong one.
You are advocating for prescriptivism, but descriptivism is a perfectly valid approach to language.
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...
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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”.
You're welcome to do that but you're wrong as far as the majority of selfhosters are concerned. Spend time on https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ for more information about how widely people define it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.
Write your own then, I guess. I prefer a developer to have at least some basic understanding of what they’re developing and why. And when they do, and when they themselves use their product, they do have opinions. In my opinion, especially if the project is open source, you’re free to do as you like.
I like opinionated software, because usually the developer uses the software themselves, and they prefer to not have some features you might like. I’m fine with that, if our opinions are similar. If not, I just might ignore that software, I guess. Sure thing, we cannot make all software opinionated, there’s no point in that. But some of it, I enjoy it to be that way.
What this really means is that there are few configuration options, that it works mostly out of the box, and that it fits the tastes and needs of the developer. I can't really fault open source devs for that, it's a way to conserve resources. If I don't like something I go look elsewhere (or think about building my own then abandon the project in a git repo somewhere).
I agree. Good software should be configurable, not opinionated. It's fine to have defaults, but if you can't change the defaults to suit you then the software isn't very good.
> I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.
What you tell it can be ambiguous or underspecified. "Opinionated" refers to the decisions the software makes so that you don't have to. Sometimes it also refers to having a default configuration that most users would find acceptable (but which can still be modified).
Me too, but writing software that does whatever user tells it to do, in a consistent and robust way, is very hard. Making it accessible and developing good UX for that kind of software is even harder. This is why a lot of heavily-customizable software, IMO, is so hard to use and maintain in the long run.
On the other hand, if the developer, who is by definition immersed in the domain, can use their experience to make good decisions and enforce them with limitations, the resulting software has a higher chance to be easier to use and easier to maintain.
I tend to gravitate towards "opinionated" software with very limited customizability because in my experience that kind of software is of better quality, on average.
Self hosting is great. The examples in this article are not exactly shining examples: an API that shows your Spotify stats?
If we’re going to talk about self hosting music, I’d like to mention Roon, which is loved by audiophiles. It aims at creating a magazine like experience for navigating and discovering music. Been using it since COVID and it’s completely transformed my experience of listening to something else than the same playlist over and over.
The fact that it's a subscription is slightly off putting.
Loved the UI photos, but I guess I'll continue with Navidrome + Feishin/Symfonium.
I bought the lifetime membership half a decade ago and never looked back. It's a bit like the Plex one in that sense.
Jellyfin user but also leaning on the Feishin/Symfonium desktop/mobile combo. Two of the best UX in the game
Thanks for the tip! I run these things mostly for fun - the Spotify stats thing isn't super useful, but it is fun to look at how my listening habits have changed over the years.
It slightly more than just an API though: one can't aggregate directly from the Spotify API.
I like listening to the same playlist over an over. Magazine for music? I would like to have time for magazines. But it would be about electronic and RC-models.
How is this Roon selfhosting when its 14,99€/m? Isnt this just another Streaming Service?
You can self host a server on your machine, and buy a license for it. Not all software you run on your own machine has to be open source. See: Plex for example.
> Not all software you run on your own machine has to be open source.
You can take that risk if you want to. I prefer to not make myself dependent on a single vendor whenever possible.
I'm not super familiar, but it looks like you're subscribing to Roon's metadata but it's "bring your own music" (to quote their FAQ) which can be files you self-host and/or supported music streaming services (which don't include Roon) that you subscribe to separately.
There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want to use it by pointing my browser at a machine name (of another device I own) and port number, rather than by launching a dedicated program?
Most people have many devices: phones, tablets, laptops, etc... so this makes that stuff accessible from anywhere. And if you lose your device, or it dies, you don't lose all your data. On that note: self-hosting allows you to centralize your backups.
I do have backup storage, of course.
It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync.
And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for long enough (or using it for anything critical enough) to really worry about how to achieve "centralized backups". I'd rather not transmit that data over the Internet when I could just connect the laptop physically to my backup storage when I got home.
> It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS
Not even listening to music in the car? That is probably my #1 phone use case by far outside of the communications functions you mentioned. I run a Navidrome server at home, and while on the go my phone can stream any music I like from the home server (so I don't need to load it in advance). In theory one might store the music on one's phone of course, but I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.
> Not even listening to music in the car?
I generally prefer to have access to all my senses on public transit, but there are any number of other portable devices I could use that store the music locally.
> I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.
If I were going to choose from among that much music I might as well search the Internet anyway. An entry-level microSD the size of my thumbnail now holds a couple hundred CDs worth (at uncompressed CD quality; several times that for high-quality opus).
You seem to be an extreme outlier and probably not the target audience for such applications. No offense, but nobody is carrying around multiple devices when the one device we all have can do everything and do it better.
How come the connection is stable enough to be streaming on the go from the car? Or is there some serious caching happening?
MP3s are tiny. Just download + cache the n and n+1 song. On a modern 4g or 5g connection downloading an entire song takes seconds. Anytime a new song starts up, grab the n+1 song as soon as possible.
But aside from that, inside any metro area even a 200ms or so buffer would likely suffice for streaming music.
Yep, and OPUS files are even lighter. That's why I just sync a "currently listening" music folder with Syncthing and do not think about connection, caching and all that. (I have the rest reachable when I need it, of course.)
200ms and even n+1 won't cut it for a subway, a semi-basement pub, a tunnel, a train or an airplane trip, a hike, a countryside visit, etc.
well then you have a very niche use of your computing devices.
Others already answered with information that you usually have more devices then just 1. So you can have access to your data from PC, laptop and your phone. I for once also like to have my own data my own. I.e. I have:
- my own email server
- my own files sharing service
- service for cardDav, CalDav etc.
- service for editing my own office files on mobile
- notes that are synchronized
- streaming of movies and music
- build and git server
- my own smart home service
- notification service
- chat
- VPN
- desktop sharing service
- my own DNS for blocking adds
- and others
I tried various Things to be able to access my own DNA while not at home and ended up using wire guard for my subnet so that I always have access to my DNA server. Right now I am solving it with mikrotiks "back to home" app., but the regular wire guard app does it as well. It uses very little battery.
You mean DLNA? Like media server? The ones I am/was using are quite wide spread. The most popular is plex I think, but I never liked that you have to register someplace else to be access your local library, crazy notion for me.
Anyway the nginx reverse proxy is enough for those. You can login and listen to your own music or watch your movies anywhere.
Checkout for example here: https://github.com/linuxserver/reverse-proxy-confs
Sorry. It was an autocorrect mishap. I meant DNS.
Reads like a cool sci-fi story premise. Remote access to base DNA for the robotic body for person verification, or for a self-mutating or rapidly evolving organism.
So, I am a victim of autocorrect. I mean DNS.
Can you list out the names of services?
You could have a look at the following list, as there are a lot of options to choose from in each category: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Sure but not here. It is too public forum. Drop me an email and I send you some examples.
Because most people have multiple devices. I self host about 20 services, that get accessed from 7 different devices for just 2 people.
A lot of the stuff we're selfhosting just.... isn't a standalone application. My mastodon server has to run always to get messages. My nexcloud has to be always on to get my phone backups.
The only thing that might make sense to be local is media, but only if you don't share with someone else and you want to maintain an offline copy of your library on each device you use.
In general, it's stuff that needs to be shared or needs to run 24/7. A lot of that just doesn't make any sense as a desktop application.
All rationalization aside, it's a hobby. It's fun. People spin up hulking enterprise gear at home and run jellyfin just for kicks. It's not supposed to be at all practical or to even make sense. It's silly nonsense on purpose.
Specifically with the Spotify service, the problem with the Spotify API is that you can only request listening data for the last 100 played songs iirc. You can manually request the data from Spotify, but it will take them a month or two to give you the data and it will be a snapshot of it.
So if you want live updates on statistics about your listening habits you need a service running 24/7 querying the Spotify API and storing the information in a database. Assumedly since most people don't have a computer to run this on 24/7, a server is necessary / preferred.
I've actually written an application doing something similar, it's very annoying that Spotify's API works like this.
> what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly?
Having access to multiple computers/devices as a single user became cheap and more common. If it was still the 2000s (or maybe early 2010s) and somebody only used a single PC for most of their tasks that'd make sense, but that's just not the reality most people live anymore
As far as I can tell, the price range for consumer PCs hasn't really moved since then. If anything it's worse now for people who expect to have a good quality graphics card. Owning a smartphone outright isn't cheap, either.
You can buy a mini pc for >$200 USD that is capable of running most desktop tasks and can also handle server tasks. Good quality integrated graphics APUs are also plentiful and fairly easy to come by these days.
I don't think it's a fad. Just more people talking about it openly that might be doing it.
New to me might not mean new to others.
Self hosting is not valued on what someone else self-hosts, it's about what you self host that's valuable to you.
I think people don't know what they want, but they like fiddling with computers. So, they imagine future scenarios where they would have problems (which they don't) and imagine solutions for those problems they don't have, and spend time implementing those solutions.
For example. Whenever RSS comes up, I say that newsboat is the best thing. People don't like it because it doesn't synchronize devices. Really? Why not have a device for reading, and read there? I have newsboat on my laptop and I A) don't have to read on my phone, B) can't read on my phone, and C) don't have to spend my free time doing unpaid maintenance for a job which I created for myself. Win-win-win.
> Why not have a device for reading, and read there?
I'm curious to know why you think this way of doing is "correct"? I like reading my RSS feeds on my phone. And on my laptop. And on my tablet, sometimes.
I didn't use the word "correct", you did.
In any case, if you're reading on your phone it's most likely because you're addicted to your phone and open the app impulsively. Consider that.
> I didn't use the word "correct", you did.
You do know we can infer unwritten things from context, right?
> I say that newsboat is the best thing
> Why not have a device for reading, and read there?
These sound like you believe your way of doing is the correct one and people reading on multiple devices are wrong. You don't have to say it for readers to understand it this way.
Please don't play weasel word games, you know exactly what the poster meant. Your showing an awful mindset where you scold people who don't share your preferences and world view. Stop it.
I read RSS on my desktop when I'm at home, on my work laptop when I'm at work, and on my phone in-between. And that works perfectly. Why would I want to reduce my options?
Maybe for some. But for me I do not want giant corp own my data. Like I do give keys to my house to some company or I do not have people manage my own money. Just as a principle.
newsboat doesn't give anyone any data.
Never heard of it.
I just tried to explain to you why I DO THIS.
I guess there are a few reasons: easier to develop cross platform, easier to reuse for non-self hosted, easier for programmers familiar with web development to implement, less activation cost for users, less friction to use with multiple devices.
You'll need to port that to windows, linux, Mac, android, and ios for a typical device mix of someone doing self-hosting, and no access from more closed platforms that have a browser.
I can understand Linux programs not being easily made to work on Android, but I can't understand why I'd ever need or want a device that runs Android and a device that runs IOS. Unless they're test devices for development, but I wouldn't be using those to access services in my day-to-day life.
I dislike the iOS experience and have used an Android phone daily for nearly 15 years. The iPad Pro is objectively better than any Android tablet, even with the limitations of the OS.
Think multi user households too. But many people have a few ios devices even if they primarily use android (apple tv, vision pro) and vice versa.
I guess to avoid having to install such dedicated programs for you and everyone you give access to, or just to have fun coding some little web project
> I pay for a cheap droplet at DigitalOcean, about $5 per month, and an additional dollar for backup.
Wait, I thought self hosting meant having your own hardware at like home running all your services. Not DigitalOcean.
No, it just means running the software on a server you control. That can be a physical server at home, or it can be something like DigitalOcean.
There is always going to be a point of failure. For many of us, self-hosting on a dedicated server, VPS, or some sort of cloud service is much better than keeping the hardware to do it at home.
My stuff is spread out among a dedicated server and 3 VPS's. --I could and should drop one of the VPS's, but if it'll take me a couple of hours, it's just not worth it until I actually have the time to spare.
It depends of your needs and resources of course but you can keep in some drawer or basement some old or small PC and you basically do not have to spend money on this, but for paid servers you have to spend 20-50$/month for something sensible. 1tb of backup in some s3 service costs like 120$ per year, and 1TB is not that much. In reality paid servers will be close to 1k$/year and in that price you can have sensible machine.
Sure, I could get a server at home, but then I have to figure out how to make it quiet enough that I don't notice it while keeping it from overheating - something that's hard enough to do with the equipment I already have. And then I have to worry about what happens if somebody decides to have fun trying to DDOS something on my home connection. Again, easier to rent a dedicated server so I don't have to worry about it.
I guess it depends on your country climate, here, where I live in the basement I have steady 22-23 degrees C, so not a problem really. Also I do not have even GPU there which is the most problematic part usually.
About DDOS, you should not your server directly connected to the internet. Use some router or managed switch first. Usually it have already some kind of protection on whatever device is connected to your internet provider infrastructure.
Another question is why would anybody DDOS you? You are not important enough. When I bought domain and connected it to my VPS - I got almost instantly visitors (probably bots looking for new domains being registered) trying bruteforce an access. And I almost instantly blocked Root login and Password auth. They were still trying to login. So I moved the port to higher one. It was calm for few months and then they found new port and again tried to ram it down. So I blocked IPs only to predefined set.
It was exactly the same when I opened my server to the internet with new domain. From that point of view it does not matter if this is your machine, VPS or dedicated server on some rack somewhere. You are responsible for its security.
When I read that someone disable password login (rightfully so), then they take additional steps to stop some bots to randomly brute force them with a password…
You can always "do more" yourself. I think we all can agree that it would not be reasonable to build your own server (including) from first principles so it's always a question of where you want to draw the line. IMO what matters is how much you influence the end result and how well you are equipped to deal with bs from those your solution depends on. A VPS just means you let someone else deal with hardware issues but are still fully controlling the software - and the interface between the two is a relatively standard virtual machine which makes it easy to migrate elsewhere when the provider decides to sequeeze you.
I didn't realize, but apparently this is a long-standing argument. I did just a tiny bit of digging because I'm sort of into self-hosting and I ran across the selfhosted Reddit's wiki on the topic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/wiki/selfhosted
TLDR: they don't differentiate on whether you own the hardware or not.
Basically it sounds like IaaS is fine (even though someone else manages the hardware and restricts OS choices), and even PaaS is fine (even though someone else manages the hardware, the OS, and the configuration of interpreters such as php / node.js / python / etc.), since these let you run your own code (which can include your instance of community code). Only SaaS would be excluded, as these don't let you run your own code.
IaaS VPS's and rented colo VMs are definitely fine. PaaS is... slightly not? it's the grey edge!
SaaS is definitely not you running stuff you control or could move anywhere.
If it's a buck standard linux box, yeah that's self hosting!
That's true, but this still gives OP some level of control
Something pikapods looked neat at first then soon I realised the costs add up and add up a lot. One day I was calculating it at pikapods at I realised I had crossed 27 USD/m and I wasn't even finished. Like those streaming services - everything on a new streaming service i.e a new pod and they cost separately. I wish there was a service which would take away the pain of installation and maintenance away from me but let me host a lot of absolutely single user (i.e. only I'd access that of course) and as light weight as it can get and as low in usage at it gets on one single "pod" or "instance" or "box" and charge for that. Also, it's not a pikapods or pikapods' problem, it's a general problem I believe.
I will say, Pikapods is really nice because they give a cut back to the developers of Open Source. I'm the maintainer of Kavita, a popular self-hosted reading server and pikapods gives me something like 10-15% cut of each user running Kavita.
My comment was not on integrity of pikapods or their functioning. Rather how even such a setup results in costs adding up and that could be a net negative to self hosting.
PS. Your app's name kavita - does it mean poem/poetry or it means something else?
For what it's worth, I wrote a very bare bones RSS reader in an afternoon. It really just renders a set of RSS feeds into HTML and nothing else.
But it was fun to and educational to build and could pretty easily be extended to add more features.
I would recommend just going for it if you are interested in writing one. It's not as hard as it sounds.
This is my self-hosted list--all of which are hosted on a 1-cpu, 1G RAM VPS :)
1. siyuan - a lightweight note-taking website like obsidian
2. readeck - a lightweight bookmark website scrapes original page to the local server while keeping the original formatting.
3. leantime - a lightweight project management website
Side note - Grafana actually looks quite a lot better in light mode.
Linkding is really nice. I have a bunch of bookmark shortcuts saved that I still need to import into it.
I've taken this one step further: I self-host archivebox which is basically a self-hosted wayback machine. That way my bookmarks are immune to articles being taken down / moved / modified.
I self-host a pretty lightweight bookmark website——readeck, it scrape original page to the local server while keeping the original formatting.
Auto archive is already built into linkding fyi
I’ve also been thinking of the product manual idea. I’ll subscribe to your rss and see if you beat me to it.
Very happy to learn about the Grafana Strava plugin. I have been worried about that data for a while!
Just wait until folk hear about colocation.
Been colocating for 10 years now, the best of both worlds.
I'd love to colocate some hardware but all the options near me (Sydney, Australia) are insanely expensive for no reason, how do you go about finding affordable rackspace?
Ship it to the next best DC in a foreign country. Iceland, Sweden, Austria all have great DCs and connectivity and are the best prices outside of my city. Your latency will suffer but for personal, semi-professional you end up with a fun hobby.
Buy something second hand off eBay and have it shipped directly to the DC. Most are kitted with a KVM, so you can then configure all the settings when racked. When it's time to retire they are normally happy to do so for a small fee.
Same with spare hardware, send a couple of spare drives. Make friends with the DCops team and they'll be happy to swap parts.
WebHostingTalk is another good resource for research and colo offers/self hosting [0]
One day I hope for my own /29 but with IPv4 exhaustion don't count on it. A /27 when used sensibly works well.
[0] https://www.webhostingtalk.com/
I don't think your options are going to have great latency to Australia - unless gp is mostly hosting things for other (worldwide) users they should keep the servers closer than that for the best experience.
Is the infrastructure immutable or artisanal.
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>)
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.
That seems ripe for an alternative version of the popular “loops to goat farming” quote:
> I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
Meanwhile, that person learned the valuable skills of programming loops, recording, playing, and making drums, and goat farming; I suspect they may be happier doing some of those things than making music from other people's loops, which is where they started.
I bet they met a bunch of interesting people along the way.
Very possible but if they go an tell someone using loops that they aren't really making music they'd still be an asshole.
Managing your own hardware can be fun and rewarding but it isn't actually required for the original goal of regaining control over your digital life. And it's not like if you start with a VPS you can never move to your own hardware in case you find building on someone else's service too limiting.
> [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.
> 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
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-...
Sometimes drastically.
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.
Literally not meaning literally is literally an example of the enshitification of language.
> the enshitification of language
Good example of words losing their meaning. “Enshittification” is barely an infant as a word and it has a very specific meaning, but people are already using to mean “something I dislike”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
> Were that the case, “literally” would not literally mean both itself and its opposite.
It doesn't mean the opposite. People misuse it a lot in that way, but they are quite wrong.
Read the link and follow the definition. The “figurative”, “for emphasis” usage of literally was officially added to dictionaries, meaning it is official it means that, whether we like it or not. Whenever you tell people they are wrong for that usage of “literally”, you are now the wrong one.
You are advocating for prescriptivism, but descriptivism is a perfectly valid approach to language.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/descriptive-vs-presc...
We all use plenty of words by their “wrong” meaning, because they changed over time and before we were born.
That's actually not correct at all.
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...
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!
I have seen the term “data sovereignty” used occasionally.
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.
> 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.
I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;)
Though I guess I missed "on a server"
> 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.
A phone can be a great “server“ too.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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”.
> This is where I will disagree and stand fast.
You're welcome to do that but you're wrong as far as the majority of selfhosters are concerned. Spend time on https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ for more information about how widely people define it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Real self-hosters use butterflies
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.
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.
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.
What do you call what the author is doing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Self-admin
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.
completely agree, though it depends on why you self host.
How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.
Write your own then, I guess. I prefer a developer to have at least some basic understanding of what they’re developing and why. And when they do, and when they themselves use their product, they do have opinions. In my opinion, especially if the project is open source, you’re free to do as you like.
I like opinionated software, because usually the developer uses the software themselves, and they prefer to not have some features you might like. I’m fine with that, if our opinions are similar. If not, I just might ignore that software, I guess. Sure thing, we cannot make all software opinionated, there’s no point in that. But some of it, I enjoy it to be that way.
What this really means is that there are few configuration options, that it works mostly out of the box, and that it fits the tastes and needs of the developer. I can't really fault open source devs for that, it's a way to conserve resources. If I don't like something I go look elsewhere (or think about building my own then abandon the project in a git repo somewhere).
Yeah it's more of a disclaimer than a sales pitch.
I agree. Good software should be configurable, not opinionated. It's fine to have defaults, but if you can't change the defaults to suit you then the software isn't very good.
> I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.
What you tell it can be ambiguous or underspecified. "Opinionated" refers to the decisions the software makes so that you don't have to. Sometimes it also refers to having a default configuration that most users would find acceptable (but which can still be modified).
>I want it to do what I tell it.
Me too, but writing software that does whatever user tells it to do, in a consistent and robust way, is very hard. Making it accessible and developing good UX for that kind of software is even harder. This is why a lot of heavily-customizable software, IMO, is so hard to use and maintain in the long run.
On the other hand, if the developer, who is by definition immersed in the domain, can use their experience to make good decisions and enforce them with limitations, the resulting software has a higher chance to be easier to use and easier to maintain.
I tend to gravitate towards "opinionated" software with very limited customizability because in my experience that kind of software is of better quality, on average.
Came out of nodejs part of the world from what I can tell and spread
Compliment in that it’s supposed to mean something akin to principled I guess
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