Start Self Hosting

Self-host in your basement, use nginx as your reverse proxy and add tls with letsencrypt. I'd argue this is more secure than most modern applications.

> It gives you the peace of mind by keeping you in control of your data.

I like the sentiment and the points made, but the author uses this amorphous concept of "your data" throughout and I feel like it simplifies things a lot and conflates many different issues.

Most people shouldn't focus on self-hosting literally all the data related to them. This is a sort of perfectionist mental compulsion many of us on HN are familiar with. You have to decide what data you actually really don't want to live without in the rare event you lose access to it, and prioritize that. For most people, this data is not very complex: family photos and videos, an album by an obscure artist, a game you like to play every few years or hope to show your children.

If you are an activist, or someone creating dissident media, or something like that, you should already be wary of the cloud -- the incentives already drive you to use tools that are secure and self-host when needed.

If you truly don't like the ways the big tech companies are doing things, you should find ways to organize with others and demand change; otherwise you are just modifying your personal habits and thinking you are sticking it to the Man with a one-person boycott.

Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on.

Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable.

While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.

I think the whole "self hosting isn't easy" meme gets repeated so much that people just take it as given now and default to managed software. Or, someone might argue "Well, my grandmother who knows nothing about tech cannot self-host, so it's not viable!" ignoring there is a huge spectrum of competence between grandma and a seasoned Linux sysadmin. People aren't morons, and there's enough info out there on how to do it. I agree it's not organized very well, but it's not like setting up a web server is dark wizardry.

With all the tools out there and easy access to VPS services and even bare metal for your basement, there's never been a better time to self host. And not just web servers, but E-mail, git, photos and media, and so on, it's very accessible.

You know what would be kind of neat? Like, a web site you'd go to called makemeoneofthose.com, and you'd click some buttons, and then sometime later you'd have a hosting setup that you own with some software, web server(s) and database(s) on it, and then you can go hack on it yourself, add some features, whatever. Like they send you some AWS keys and say "It's all yours. Good luck and don't forget to pay your hosting bill."

And now you have a blog, a picture-sharing thingie, a bulletin board, a whatever.

Maybe there could even be a version where you pick a datacenter and somebody racks up a PC for you with the software on it.