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What I Self Host

(fredrikmeyer.net)
116 points FredrikMeyer | 4 comments | 20 Oct 25 16:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.604s | 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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Semaphor ◴[20 Oct 25 16:59 UTC] No.45646220[source]▶
The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want. Some of it on my 2 mini servers in my living room, some (prosody and seafile) on a VPS. Calling the latter not self hosted seems weird to me.
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1. latexr ◴[20 Oct 25 17:08 UTC] No.45646328[source]▶
> The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want.

That seems a bit vague. If you tell that to someone who never heard of self-hosting, they’d be excused for wondering if that means downloading from an App Store and opening the settings.

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2. Semaphor ◴[20 Oct 25 17:24 UTC] No.45646550[source]▶
I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;)

Though I guess I missed "on a server"

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3. latexr ◴[20 Oct 25 17:34 UTC] No.45646672[source]▶
> I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;)

Fair! Not everyone on HN is a programmer, but there is overrepresentation.

> Though I guess I missed "on a server"

Yes, that’s what I was thinking was missing.

4. 47282847 ◴[21 Oct 25 02:10 UTC] No.45651695[source]▶
A phone can be a great “server“ too.