Selfhosting is the act of hosting applications on "hardware you control". That could be rented or owned, its the same to us. You could go out and buy a server to host your applications but there a few issues that you might run into that could prevent you from simply standing up a server rack in your spare room. From shitty ISPs to lack of hardware knowledge there are plenty of reasons to just rent a VPS. Either way youre one of us :)

Self hosting basically means you are running the server application yourself. It doesn't matter if it's at home, on a cloud service or anywhere else.

I wouldn't recommend hosting a social network like lemmy, because you would be legally responsible for all the content served from your servers. That means a lot of moderation work. Also, these types of applications are very demanding in terms of data storage, you end up with an ever growing dataset of posts, pictures etc.

But self hosting is very interesting and empowering. There are a lot of applications you can self host, from media servers (Plex, Jellyfin), personal cloud (like Google Drive) with NextCloud, blocking ads with pihole, sync servers for various apps like Obsidian, password manager BitWarden etc. You can even make your own website by coding it, or using a CMS platform like WordPress.

Check the Awesome Self-hosted list on GitHub, has a ton of great stuff.

And in terms of hardware, any old computer or laptop can be used, just install your favorite server OS (Linux, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, even Windows Server). You can play with virtualization too if you have enough horsepower and memory with ESXI or Proxmox, so you can run multiple severs at once on the same computer.

Me, yes. But it's still selfhosting if you do it on a VPS. And probably easier, too. I mainly do it at home, because I can have multiple large harddisks this way. And storage is kind of expensive in the cloud.

I'd say there are levels to selfhosting. Hosting your stuff on the cloud is selfhosting, but hosting it on your own hardware is a more "pure" way of doing it imo. Not that it's better, both have their advantages, but it's certainly a more committed to the idelal

"Self-hosted" means you are in control of the platform. That doesn't mean you have to own the platform outright, just that you hold the keys.

Using a VPS to build a Nextcloud server vs using Google Drive is like the difference between leasing a car and taking a taxi. Yes, you don't technically own the car like you would if you bought it outright, but that difference is mostly academic. The fact is you're still in the driver's seat, controlling how everything works. You get to drive where you want to, in your own time, you pick the music, you set the AC, you adjust the seats, and you can store as much stuff in the trunk as you want, for as long as you want.

As long as you're the person behind the metaphorical wheel, it's still self-hosting.

Are people actually running their own actual self-hosted servers from home?

My lemmy instance is hosted in my basement

Yep, big ol' case under my desk with some 20TB of storage space.

Most of what I host is piracy related 👀

I'm sure the original spirit of selfhosting is actually owning the hardware (whether enterprise- or consumer-grade) but depending on your situation, renting a server could be more stable or cost effective. Whether you own the hardware or not, we all (more or less) have shared experiences anyway.

Where I live, there are some seasons wherein the weather could be pretty bad and internet or electricity outages can happen. I wouldn't mind hours or even days of downtime for a service whose users are only myself or a few other people (i.e. non-critical services) like a private Jellyfin server, a Discord bot, or a game server.

For a public Lemmy server, I'd rather host it on the cloud where the hardware is located in a datacenter and I pay for other people to manage whatever disasters that could happen. As long as I make regular backups, I'm free to move elsewhere if I'm not satisfied with their service.

As far as costs go, it might be cheaper to rent VMs if you don't need a whole lot of performance. If you need something like a dedicated GPU, then renting becomes much more expensive. Also consider your own electricity costs and internet bills and whether you're under NAT or not. You might need to use Cloudflare tunnels or rent a VPS as a proxy to expose your homeserver to the rest of the world.

If the concern is just data privacy and security, then honestly, I have no idea. I know it's common practice to encrypt your backups but I don't know if the Lemmy database is encrypted itself or something. I'm a total idiot when it comes to these so hopefully someone can chime in and explain to us :D

For Lemmy hosting guides, I wrote one which you can find here but it's pretty outdated by now. I've moved to rootless Docker for example. The Lemmy docs were awful at the time so I made some modifications based on past experiences with selfhosting. If you're struggling with their recommended way of installing it, you can use my guide as reference or just ask around in this community. There's a lot of friendly people who can help!

Most people who "self host" things are still doing it on a server somewhere outside their home. Could be a VPS, a cloud instance, colocated bare metal, ...

Certain cloud providers are as secure, if not more secure, than a home lab. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. are responding to 0-day vulnerabilities on the reg. In a home lab, that is on you.

To me, self-hosted means you deploy, operate, and maintain your services.

Why? Varied...the most crucial reason is 1) it is fun because 2) they work.

I have a salvaged HP 3500 Pro with an HTPC case and 8.5 TB storage. Started mainly for Jellyfin and now have half a dozen docker containers on it. Great test bed for getting used to linux before I slowly creep towards having it as my main OS on my PC.

No that's a homelab. Selfhosted applies to the software that you install and administrate yourself so you have full control over it. If it was about running hardware at home we'd see more posts about hardware.

There are definitely benefits on running a server at home but you could say the same of a VPS. As long as you control it, it is self hosted in my book.

My "server" is just my old gaming PC that I slapped Ubuntu on.

I do both. I have a custom built NAS based on a Ryzen 3600 and ZFS across 4 drives which runs about 20 self hosted applications and stores the majority of my files but its only accessible from within the home. I also rent a small VPS for personal webspace and hosting self hosted apps I want out of the house.

In the past I have also hosted raw servers from Hetzner or bigger VPS from Amazon for the purpose of hosting a game server. Alongside those I often had community applications like website, forums, wikis and custom chat and voice comms services.

Its all self hosting to me since I run it. The various options are all about the trade offs of security, accessibility, cost and performance. The cheaper cloud options when you add it up can be cheap compared to buying and running your own hardware when you take into account electrical costs and the likely hardware replacement needs within 5 years. The big cloud providers aren't price competitive but Contabo/Hetzner really surprisingly are especially if you pay a lot for electricity. But then if you need a game server it can be quite hard to find good fast CPUs on the cloud and its not going to be 24/7 for communities, so the trade off flips back to having your own.

Since I got 1 gbit/s fibre internet my need for internal NAS has definitely reduced as the internet is nearly as fast as the local network so I could now have my NAS needs remote.

I pay Dreamhost for a beef pc VPS, that's what "selfhosted" means to me. I host all kinds of shit on it.

For me it does. I'm sure some other people use a VPS or something and self host using a cloud provider of some kind.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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It's not strictly defined like that. Some people do, others don't.

I do not think that self-hosting necessarily means that you have to host it at home. As others have pointed out, its more about hosting it on hardware you control.

I do think there is certainly a trust factor involved if you host stuff on hardware that you don't own, but at the end of the day only you can deem whom you can trust. For example, I rent a couple of dedicated servers from a provider, but I also have a pretty good personal connection with the owner of that provider - so I have no concerns about the safety of my data. In general, I tend to just be pretty conscientious about what data is going to any server, and anything that I wouldn't want falling into the wrong hands doesn't leave my house unless I can guarantee its safety (with the likes of encryption and such).

I do also keep in mind that with the various providers out there, reputation is paramount to them (or at least, the good ones) so it is generally in their best interest to say, let someone walk into their datacenter and just start ripping the drives from your systems.