by xoa | 2025-10-09 15:28:52+00:00
This 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 business model mismatch: ultimately much of the value of cloud services comes from flexibility and amortization across massive audiences. Sometimes that's exactly what one might be after. But sometimes that can leave a big enough mismatch between how it gets charged for vs what you want to do that you will flat out save money, a lot of money, very fast with your own metal you can adjust to yourself.

- Speed: Somewhat related to above but on the performance side instead of cost. 10G at this point is nothing on a LAN and it's been regularly easy to pick up used 100G Chelsio NICs for <$200, I've got a bunch of them. Switches have been slowly coming down in price as well, Mikrotik's basic 4 port 100G switch is $200/port brand new. If you're ok with 25 or 40 can do even less. Any of those is much, much faster (and of course lower latency) then the WAN links a lot of us have access to, even at a lot of common data centers that'd be quite the cost add. And NVMe arrays have made it trivial to saturate that, even before getting into the computing side. Certainly not everyone has that kind of data and wants/needs to be able to access it fast offline, but it's not useless.

- Customization: catch all for beyond all-of-the-above, but just you really can tune directly to what you're interested in terms of cpu/memory/gpu/storage/whatever mix. You can find all sorts of interesting used stuff for cheap and toss it in if you want to play with it. Make it all fit you.

- Professional development: also not common, but on HN in particular probably a number of folks would derive some real benefit from kicking the tires on the various lower level moving parts that go into the infrastructure they work with at a higher level normally. Once in awhile you might even find it leads to entire new career paths, but I think even if one typically works with abstractions having a much better sense of what's behind them is occasionally quite valuable.

Not to diminish the value of privacy/sovereignty either, but there are had dollar/euro/yen considerations as well. I also think self hosting tends to build on itself, in that there can be a higher initial investment in infrastructure but then previously hard/expensive adaptions get easier and easier. Spinning up a whole isolated vm/jail/vlan/dynamic allocation becomes trivial.

Of course, it is upfront investment, you are making some bets on tech, and it's also just plain more physical stuff, which takes up physical space of yours. I think a fair number of people might get value out of the super shallow end of the pool (starting with having your own domain) but there's nothing wrong with deliberately leaning on remote infra in general for most. But worth reevaluating from time to time, because the amount of high value and/or open source stuff available now is just wonderful. And if we have a big crash might be a lot of great deals to pick up!