This is purely for my own personal curiosity, but what’s the main reason you self-host? I say main because I don’t know how to allow multiple answers, if that’s possible at all. For me it’s the last option; because it’s cool. If it’s none of these reasons, absolutely make additional options in the comments.
@ mods, if this in any way breaks any of the rules or just generally detracts from the sub at all, I’ll gladly remove it. Also I didn’t flair it because none of the flairs seem to fit.
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Cost, and control.
I want to own my stuff. And I want direct control over it. I want it to do exactly what I want, when I want, how I want. I’m sick of paying monthly rental charges, and I’m sick of companies making changes to services that negatively impact my experience.
My hardware, my software, my rules. Simple as that really.
Privacy, it is almost impossible in the modern era. But still a bit more under control
Security, it is an illusion, very hard to keep on security
Cost, the hardware, time invested and energy may be higher than standard services
Education, good reason
Because it is cool, yeah it is
Better services, disagree, they are not better, usually clumsy and high maintenance, may work as intended or lack features
There is a simpler reason I like self hosting, I don’t want to be subject to the mercy of the changing of rules of a tool I can’t manage. Possible closure, increasing cost, features by tiers, I really hate subscription models.
Independence. I’m done with relying on external service providers. They can’t be trusted. There is an inherent conflict of interests between commercial service providers and their users. It’s not in their best interest to provide the best service possible, it’s in their interest to provide a service that is barely better than the competition (if there even is any competition). That’s the reason why commercial services are never great and always just “meh”. I don’t want to rely on parties whose interests are against mine. Because sooner or later they will turn into shit.
I started out self hosting everything… 20 years ago or so. Then I got swept up in the “cloud” movement and put so many things into the “cloud”.
Today I’m reverting back to how I started, self hosting everything that I can.Mainly privacy, but also because they keep changing and I don’t want to have to worry about them.
I just didn’t feel like it was ‘my’ data anymore.Because hosting commercially with large (multi-TB) storage gets very expensive very quickly
D. All of the above. Mainly to learn but I wouldn’t put my self hosted services anywhere else.
I have not bothered to rank my many reasons. Why would I?
Privacy and control are the main reasons why I host some of my data myself. This choice is closely linked to my values, as I’m not comfortable with the idea of entrusting my data to large companies whose only motivation is to make more money over customer satisfaction. I prefer to keep my autonomy.
However, simplicity is the main reason why I choose not to self-host certain elements. For example, I’m not yet ready to manage the self-hosting of my e-mails.Many years ago I finally got fed up with having my favorite tools for productivity becoming obsolete or just disappearing. It was at that point that I decided to base my entire workflow on simple text files. The development of clouds made it much easier to adopt lots of self-hosted tools that could be based on text files, such as some apps in Nextcloud.
Stuff can disappear or stop being free at any time for no reason, with no notice.
Education, sometimes better service, mostly because I just have fun with and regarding video streaming because I’m not willing to pay for every service existing.
I’m going to say sort of all of the above, but not just across the whole board. Some services I host because I want a better service than is available elsewhere.
For example I host AdGuard Home and OPNsense because it’s better than my ISP supplied router and I get more out of it so that’s better service. I host Immich because I don’t want to pay Google to store all my photos when I have a server sat here that’s quite capable of doing it so that’s cost I guess.
Privacy, Education, Being Cool. Also, there are some services that are not available commercially.
Cost and privacy. Currently selfhosting adguardhome. Something like nextdns or controld cost like $35-40/year. Mine cost nothing monetarily since its hosted on oracle cloud free tier. Only costed me like an hour or two of my time to set it up. Plus i don’t trust them enough to not sell my browsing habit.
I second this. My journey started with hosting Adguard Home. I needed an adblocker that would not need to run on my phone. Then, as I expanded, I discovered an entire world out there, that fulfills all of the OP’s choices. Now I run 2 separate servers, running a host of services. My wife, not a very tech-savvy person, also loves them as they are so simple, easy to use, and don’t randomly change.
TL;DR: Started out with a specific need, expanded for all of the above reasons and more.
Can I do all of the above?