What I Self Host

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>)

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.

> [Paraphrased] Words mean different things to different people! Anyone can choose any definition they want!

No, words have quite definite meanings. Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.