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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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>)

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.

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.

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.

That's true, but this still gives OP some level of control

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

What do you call what the author is doing?

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.