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What I Self Host

(fredrikmeyer.net)
116 points FredrikMeyer | 4 comments | 20 Oct 25 16:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.786s | source
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teddyh ◴[20 Oct 25 16:40 UTC] No.45645903[source]▶
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>)

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1. lordnacho ◴[20 Oct 25 16:58 UTC] No.45646206[source]▶
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.

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2. teddyh ◴[20 Oct 25 17:02 UTC] No.45646265[source]▶
The meaning has only “wandered” due to the marketing of dishonest hosting companies, and their partially self-deluded customers who want to believe the marketing in order to avoid doing the hard work of actually self-hosting.
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3. lordnacho ◴[20 Oct 25 17:05 UTC] No.45646304[source]▶
I'm not so sure. Software people have a tendency towards abstraction, and often the bottom layer in their opinion of their own role is where you have OS control, without knowing much about the network and physical.

Whether that's reasonable, well, I kinda liked the underlayer and thought it was part of a good education. But not everyone agrees.

4. pessimizer ◴[20 Oct 25 17:34 UTC] No.45646673[source]▶
There is no such thing as "bare metal OS." Metal is hardware, and an OS is an abstraction over hardware that restricts the software's access to it.