This is purely for my own personal curiosity, but what’s the main reason you self-host? I say main because I don’t know how to allow multiple answers, if that’s possible at all. For me it’s the last option; because it’s cool. If it’s none of these reasons, absolutely make additional options in the comments.
@ mods, if this in any way breaks any of the rules or just generally detracts from the sub at all, I’ll gladly remove it. Also I didn’t flair it because none of the flairs seem to fit.
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Cost, and control.
I want to own my stuff. And I want direct control over it. I want it to do exactly what I want, when I want, how I want. I’m sick of paying monthly rental charges, and I’m sick of companies making changes to services that negatively impact my experience.
My hardware, my software, my rules. Simple as that really.
i’ve got extra gear so why not put to good use?
Stuff can disappear or stop being free at any time for no reason, with no notice.
Cost is kind of in the grey zone for data/media hoarders. Like, I bought two 16tb HDDs and that cost me a pretty penny. I could have used that same amount of money for streaming services (or whatever) and relieve myself of the pain of tinkering. Partially, it’s about saying fuck you to the giant corpos in my own little way, and a little bit is about just knowing how to get what I need without paying for them which feels neat. Sometimes I feel a little guilty doing this but most media are shit anyway, and I buy the things I really like so that’s that.
What about “it’s a fun hobby” or “for learning purposes”?
all of the above + more???
There’s no option for “all of the above” and also no option for “I just want to see the results”.
Education, sometimes better service, mostly because I just have fun with and regarding video streaming because I’m not willing to pay for every service existing.
Sheesh could have made it top 2 or 3. Talk about tough
When you use the service hosted by someone else there is a compromise on lot of features that you can have for free. Though the luxury of having privacy, security and learning while you dosel host cannot be discounted and above all free.
Cost and privacy. Currently selfhosting adguardhome. Something like nextdns or controld cost like $35-40/year. Mine cost nothing monetarily since its hosted on oracle cloud free tier. Only costed me like an hour or two of my time to set it up. Plus i don’t trust them enough to not sell my browsing habit.
I second this. My journey started with hosting Adguard Home. I needed an adblocker that would not need to run on my phone. Then, as I expanded, I discovered an entire world out there, that fulfills all of the OP’s choices. Now I run 2 separate servers, running a host of services. My wife, not a very tech-savvy person, also loves them as they are so simple, easy to use, and don’t randomly change.
TL;DR: Started out with a specific need, expanded for all of the above reasons and more.
Cool and better - It’s cool when you got something working in your house and it’s better when it’s in your hands, rather than companies which declare limitless free storage for photos and videos, and then after some time and tens of gigabytes they decide to stop uploading more data, limit max size for file and charge you to pay for this service.
Nah, I’ll rather just buy this cool mini PC, components and storage for it once and will not pay infinitely for that sometimes changing crap service.Privacy, Education, Being Cool. Also, there are some services that are not available commercially.
For me it’s both Privacy, control and education.
The cloud is just someone else’s computer.
I started for education, around 20 years ago. Then, the “main” reason shifted to cost for a short period, and is now privacy (albeit education and cost still being in line :-))