While this is only one data point, looking at the stats for r/selfhosted, self-hosting seems to be exploding in popularity since last year. The subreddit now has 2.2 on average million daily unique visitors with 175 million total views over the last 12 months, which is up 132 million visitors in comparison to the 12 months before.
Why Self-Host?
111–120 of 269 posts
Re: Why Self-Host?
#112"Many many years ago I was running an Android phone with Google services like Google Maps. One day I was looking for a feature in my Google account and saw that GMaps recorded my location history for years with detailed geocoordinates about every trip and every visit. I was fascinated but also scared about that since I've never actually enabled it myself. I do like the fact that I could look up my location for every…
One tricky thing about maps, as they relate to privacy, is that the earth is large.
Compare that to encrypted email: if I’m sending you an encrypted message, the total data involved is minimal. To a first approximation, it’s just the message contents.
But if I want “Google Maps but private,” I first need access to an entire globe’s worth of data, on the order of terabytes. That’s a lot of storage for your (usually mobile) client, and a lot of bandwidth for whoever delivers it. And that data needs to be refreshed over time.
Typical mapping applications (like Google Maps) solve this with a combination of network services that answer your questions remotely (“Tell me what you’re searching for, and I’ll tell you where it is.”) and by tiling data so your client can request exactly what it needs, and no more, which is also a tell.
The privacy focused options I see are:
1. Pre-download all the map data, like OrganicMaps [1], to perform your calculations on the device. From a privacy perspective, you reveal only a coarse-grained notion of the area you’re interested in. As a "bonus", you get an offline maps app. You need to know a priori what areas you’ll need. For directions, that's usually fine, because I’m usually looking at local places, but sometimes I want to explore a random spot around the globe. Real-time transit and traffic-adaptive routing remain unaddressed.
2. Self-host your own mapping stack, as with Headway (I work on Headway). For the reasons above, it’s harder than hosting your own wiki, but I think it’s doable. It doesn’t currently support storing personal data (where you’ve been, favorite places, etc.), but adding that in a privacy conscious way isn’t unfathomable.
[1] https://organicmaps.app (though there are others)
[2] https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway (see a hosted demo at https://maps.earth)
Re: Why Self-Host?
#113This list of "why self host" focuses almost entirely on privacy/sovereignty which, as the author admits, has come to be a pretty standard reason given. But I think there are plenty of purely practical ones as well, depending on your specific situation. There's a spectrum here from self-hosting to leaving it all to 3rd parties, and you can mix and match to get the most value out of it. But I'd add: - Use case/cloud bu…
Seems like you like networking.
Re: Why Self-Host?
#114I self host my Search Engine / RSS reader. I track every page I visit from nearly all devices.
Since my basic search engine is self hosted nobody actually sees what I visit, and what I watch.
This is my conclusion seeing that social media algorithm is totally lost at what I would like to watch next.
Also I am in control over UI, and changes, which is a good and a bad thing
Re: Why Self-Host?
#115My selfhosted stack includes: 1. immich 2. jellyfin 3. ghost 4. wallabag 5. freshrss 6. vaultwarden 7. nextcloud 8. overleaf/sharelatex 9. matrix server 10. pds for atproto
How do you upgrade to new versions? How do ship security patches? How do backup? And do you regularly test your backup? I feel like upgrade instructions for some software can be extremely light, or require you to upgrade through each version, or worse.
Not the OP.
I assume everything running in docker.
For containers: Upgrading new versions can be done headless by watchtower or manually.
For the host: You can run package updates regularly or enable unattended upgrades.
Backups can be easily done with cron + rclone. It is not a magic.
I personally run everything inside docker. Less things to concern.
Re: Why Self-Host?
#116I wish articles like this would include recommendations on how to choose hardware to run your self-hosted services on.
I would not use nuc like this guy. Had one and it was slow and it have limited capacity. Then I had my old PC and it was very good but I wanted more nvme disks and motherboard supported only 7. Now I am migrating to threadripper which is a bit overkill but I will have ability to run 1 or two GPUs along with 23 nvme disks for example.
I have two NUC’s (ryzen 7 and intel i5) they’re rock solid.
Re: Why Self-Host?
#117I also started self-hosting more and more. But instead of making services available on the internet/intranet (e.g. VPS reverse proxy/tailscale), I'm binding them to localhost and using connet [1] (cloud or self-host [2]) to cast these locally on my on my PC/phone (when I need them). These include my NAS and Syncthing instance running on my NAS and I'm looking to add more.
Re: Why Self-Host?
#118"start self-hosting more of your personal services." I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think. Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy…
This is why I built https://canine.sh -- to make installing all that stuff a single step. I was the cofounder of a small SaaS that was blowing >$500k / year on our cloud stack Within the first few weeks, you'll realize you also need sentry, otherwise, errors in production just become digging through logs. Thats a +$40 / m cloud service. Then you'll want something like datadog because someone is reporting somewhere th…
This assumes you're building a SAAS with customers though. When I started my career it was common for companies to build their own apps for themselves, not for all companies to be split between SAAS builders and SAAS users.
Re: Why Self-Host?
#119In recent years I noticed RSS has gotten way less popular, even in hacker circles (or maybe that's just my perception).
I remember browsers used to have a native RSS button in the main interface and then you could curate your feed. Seems better than any news feed thing gamified to steal my attention. Sigh.
old-man-yells-at-cloud.gif
Re: Why Self-Host?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not use nuc like this guy. Had one and it was slow and it have limited capacity. Then I had my old PC and it was very good but I wanted more nvme disks and motherboard supported only 7. Now I am migrating to threadripper which is a bit overkill but I will have ability to run 1 or two GPUs along with 23 nvme disks for example.
I'm your opposite :-) Intel n100 with 32GB RAM and single big SSD here (but with daily backups). Eats roughly 10 Watts and does the job.
If this does the job for you sure. For me they were very pricey at the time comparing to my old PC Intel core i3 that I had already lying around. And power cost does not matter really in my case.