Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Silly question but isn’t using a VPS the exact opposite of “self hosted”?
The opposite of self-hosted would be managed service.
You run it yourself at your own location however you want it
Vs
Someone runs it for you at their location. However the want it
VPS is someone loans you a VM at their location that you run yourself however you want to.
It's still relevant to self-hosted because you still have to do all the work, you were just using their network, power, air conditioning, hardware and fire suppression. You're still in the hook for installs and patches, configuration, and software issues.
The opposite of VPS is more like “home lab”.
Managing a VPS yourself still counts as self-hosting.
For me, self-hosting is about staying in control over your software and data, so I think hosting in a VPS still fits the bill, even if it isn't the way most people go about it
Aren’t you partially not in control? If that hardware gets nuked some how then you’re compromised
Sure, but with proper backups, you can be up and running somewhere else quickly, minutes even if you script it.
I mostly use it to get around CGNAT, but it totally makes sense for something that needs to be externally available anyway, like a Minecraft server.
True, but you'd still have a lot more control over your stuff than say, some Microsoft or Google product
This is one of those things where I think that purity might conflict with progress. I am currently using a VPS in a privacy-friendly country to host some stuff, and I am trying to move more of my needs there. I can easily try to host things at my house(and I do to a limited extent, I have a VPN I run through a VPS to connect my devices together to accomplish this), but dealing with the constraints of non-professional hardware management and a residential internet connection is frustrating. This frustration has in the past prevented me from reducing my use of services where I know they are farming my data, and would probably honor illegal and warrant-less data requests from government agencies. At least with IaaS, I give them money in exchange for a virtual machine, vs SaaS where I give them possibly money but more importantly permission to do whatever they want with my highly structured data(far easer to data mine a easily searchable database of PII vs a filesystem of unknown structure).
Even outside of tech, I have often found that my sense of purity gets in the way of actually making progress towards my values. Use the VPS if it will get you to stop using worse things.