There was a time in my life when I was really, REALLY into self-hosting. And though none of you, and I mean NONE of you, have asked, I'm going to tell you where I've landed after a couple years of different approaches in case it's helpful to anyone out there currently self-hosting or considering doing so. On the way I'll lay out the arguments for and against.

Why self-host?

The general argument goes that "the cloud is just someone else's computer"^[1]. If you want privacy and security, you need to host it yourself, on your own computer.

There are some parallels here to the argument for running your own blog or website. If you rely on a 3rd party site owned by a faceless megacorp, like Facebook, Twitter, or Bluesky (don't @ me), then you don't really own the space you're writing on. Your tweets can just go poof one day because you hurt Elon Musk's feelings. If you own your own domain and host, then they can't take you offline on a whim.^[2]

To an extent, that argument is true. As you can tell by the domain (willhopkins.dev), I run this blog on a vanity domain. Clearly, I'm at least somewhat bought in.

But it's not actually that simple

Even if you run your own website or service on a computer running out of your house, the Internet by its very definition requires other people and services you don't control. Your ISP, domain registrar, and ICANN are just a few of the major players involved in getting your website out there. And if Cloudflare doesn't like you (despite being famous for letting just about anything go) then they can block you from a large chunk of web users.^[3]

And we're not even touching the backbone routers and cables, government controlled censorship, etc.

It's marginally simpler for businesses, oddly enough

At my company, we use a public cloud provider. Most startups do. It's cheap, easy to spin up new resources, and you are paying to outsource a significant amount of maintenance and administration. Of course, it also comes with the risk of running your application and storing your data on someone else's computer, but for enterprise customers the risk is both generally accepted and also lower than it is for individuals, due to contractual language.

Then add technical limitations

Some services, like email, are pretty hard to self-host^[4]. They're complicated, have a lot of moving parts, and if they go down they can have a non-trivial impact on your life. I had some trouble with my custom email domain associated with Gmail earlier this year when Google transferred its domain registrar business to Squarespace, so I moved to a dedicated email host. The risk was just too great to self-host a service I use to pay bills and contact my professional network.

If you're hosting a service that others are going to use, or needs to meaningfully interact with services others host, then you're going to need some sysadmin or network admin skills that take time and practice to develop.

So... should I self-host?

The answer is that most anti-climactic of answers: it depends. I don't know you, your needs, or your skills. I can, though, explain my own thought process in the hopes you find it illuminating.

What I ask myself

For me, it depends on a series of factors:

• Who will use the service?
• What are the consequences of the service being unavailable for a time?
• What computers professional skills are required to run the service?
• How sensitive is the data?
• Is running the service locally worth the cost environmentally and on my power bill?^[5]

How this turns out in practice

For email, I fully outsource my server. I do pay for my email service, rather than using a free provider like Gmail or my ISP, because after more than a decade in tech I can 100% confirm that if you're not the customer, then you're the product.^[6] Email is very sensitive but also inherently insecure, so I pay for a high-quality provider located in a country with good data privacy laws.

Services like Linkding^[7], Ghost (this blog), and Wallabag^[8] I currently host on PikaPods^[9]. For services that I want others to interact with in some way, a host like PikaPods is almost always going to be the right choice for me personally. Dealing with reverse proxies and the risks of opening up my home network is just... ew.

File serving, my personal library of DRM-free ebooks^[10], and my photo server^[11] all run from devices physically located in my home. Tailscale serves as the network glue to make them talk to each other, which means they're accessible to people I live with but I don't try to make them work for people outside my network. My files and photos are much more sensitive than, say, the blog post I'm writing this second and will publish to the public internet any minute now.

What it costs

In the end, I pay $15ish/month to PikaPods for hosting. Email is around $10/month, and for my functional domains it probably amounts to $15-20/month. Power at my home adds on some extra cost, which I'd like to start measuring at some point, but for now it's a question mark. My 3D printer and home office probably add enough that it's moot. I consider my ISP to be "free" in this context because I need that as a remote worker.

I also donate quarterly to my Mastodon server, because I want some social media but I want it to be local, accountable, and decentralized. I donate my time as a moderator, too.

Of course, the hardware wasn't free. My NAS, off-site backups, and homelab machines cost money too. I've easily spent thousands on my home computer network and peripherals. You definitely don't need a dedicated web host at home, though, especially if you're serving something like Linkding for your own purposes.

In all, I consider this a reasonable price to pay for the stability and web presence I want. Ask yourself what you want, whether the time investment is worth it, and what you can afford. The answers will lead you to the right approach for you. Happy hosting!