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What I Self Host

(fredrikmeyer.net)
116 points FredrikMeyer | 1 comments | 20 Oct 25 16:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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dooglius ◴[20 Oct 25 17:01 UTC] No.45646259[source]▶
How do you define it? If your ISP has a problem, you can't access that hardware physically, so it would seem this definition rules out anyone that doesn't control an ISP.
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teddyh ◴[20 Oct 25 17:05 UTC] No.45646310[source]▶
This is a common, but disingenuous, objection. People also don’t make their own electricity. Is therefore “self-host” an unreachable goal, which nobody can fulfill in practice? No, this would be a useless definition.
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1. account42 ◴[21 Oct 25 11:59 UTC] No.45654770[source]▶
It's not disingenuous. Being autistic about language use is honorable when the distinction you are trying to preserve is actually valuable. It's less so when the differences aren't that big in practice because in both cases you have a lot control over the services you run but in the end are still somewhat dependent on third parties.