I am a selfhoster (as anyone who’s read many of my more recent blog posts knows). I’m also a fan of the selfh.st site (which documents a lot of news & relevant interviews from the self-host world) so I was delighted to see the owner of selfh.st get interviewed in Ars Technica.
Nothing earth-shattering but I appreciated (and agreed with) his breakdown of why self-hosting is flourishing today (excerpt below). For me, personally, the ease with which Docker makes setting up selfhosted services and the low cost of storage and mini-PCs turned this from an impractical idea into one that I’ve come to rely on for my own “personal tech stack”.
What gave rise to self-hosting’s relative recent popularity? That led Sholly to a few answers, many of them directly relating to the corporate cloud services people typically use instead of self-hosting:
- Privacy for photos, files, and other data
- Cost of cloud hosting and storage
- Accessibility of services, through GitHub, Reddit, and sites like his
- Installation with Docker (“a game-changer for lots of people”) and Unraid
- Single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi
- NUCS, mini-PCs, workstations, and other pandemic-popular hardware
Finally, there’s the elephant in any self-hosting discussion: piracy.
Self-hosting is having a moment. Ethan Sholly knows why
Kevin Purdy | Ars Technica
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