Last updated: August 19th, 2024
As someone that has run many of my own services for a while now, I feel that I can speak to the advantages and disadvantages of self-hosting. In my case, the benefits have more than made up for the drawbacks, but I think that the question of whether it’s worth it to self-host is something that each person or organization has to answer for themselves.
Learning more about system administration and software stacks by building it yourself. There are few better teachers than hands-on experience. When I first started, I didn’t even know what an A record was, but now I know much more about networking and cybersecurity.
Control and choice. For instance, you can decide what operating system will be used. Often there are multiple choices of software available for particular use cases (web servers immediately come to mind), and the configuration details are all up to you as well.
Transparency. Software that can be self-hosted is usually open source software. Because you assembled the pieces, how everything fits together is more readily apparent. That means that if something goes wrong, at least there’s some idea of where to start looking.
Repairability. If something is broken, you can fix it yourself without waiting for someone else to get to it.
Privacy. This is related to some of the other points, in that because you have control and transparency, it’s possible to know how sensitive data is being processed and what parties it’s being exposed to.
It takes time. Learning the necessary skills and setting everything up at the beginning takes patience, and the time investment doesn’t end there. Regular system maintenance is a part of managing your own server. It involves making sure that everything is still functioning correctly and performing upgrades, among other things.
Responsibility. You are responsible for everything that happens on your server. If it breaks, no one else is going to fix it. Sometimes this is a real inconvenience because things have a way of breaking at inopportune times, but this is the tradeoff for having more power and control.
It usually costs money to self-host. Recurring costs for a virtual private server and domain name can really add up over time. But these may be less than the costs you would otherwise pay for cloud computing, so context matters here.
Risk of creating an insecure environment. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s entirely possible to create vulnerabilities without even realizing it. This is why it’s important to take your time and acquire the knowledge needed to do things right. Starting small also helps (for example, there’s not much risk in hosting a static website to start out with).