Self-hosting barriers?

Posted Aug 7, 2025 14:07 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Self-hosting barriers? by raven667
Parent article: We need a European Sovereign Tech Fund (GitHub blog)

I remember when appliances were all the rage, in the late 90s-early 2000s. But most people and companies don't particularly like being responsible for hardware, and most software providers like recurring revenue. Both of those things conspired to move people onto the cloud.

I self-host everything, but not all of it at my house. I have a couple of cheap KVM instances at hosting providers; these are my public-facing machines. And the hosting providers have backup power, DDoS countermeasures, etc. that would be far too expensive/difficult for me to provide.

Then I run my actual IMAP server, phone system, etc. at home. These services are accessible only on my LAN or over a VPN.

But you have to have a certain tinkering mindset to want to do this stuff. I enjoy it, but most people probably don't. 🙂