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.
> 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.
I bet they met a bunch of interesting people along the way.
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.
No, words have quite definite meanings. Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.
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.
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”.
It doesn't mean the opposite. People misuse it a lot in that way, but they are quite wrong.
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.
Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hosting.
(Also, with 4G, 5G, and satellite-based Internet, an alternate (albeit low-bandwith) route for emergency access is fairly straightforward to set up.)
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.
Though I guess I missed "on a server"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Whether that's reasonable, well, I kinda liked the underlayer and thought it was part of a good education. But not everyone agrees.
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 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.
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.
I'm responsible for all the software that runs on them so I consider it self hosting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>)