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