I think your discounting the amount I save on my heating bill.

Im not even going to bother clicking this piece of shit article, thats bullshit fuelled by big money, an insignificant piece of opinion for low IQ victims.

Well I definitely save atleast $100 a month by self hosting and not subbing to streaming services.

What an absolutely useless oped. TFA provides no numbers; no analysis. Just an unsubstantiated opinion based on a narrow definition of “self hosting”. It cites cost of electricity and hardware; what about VPS? Does TFA assume 0-cost email hosting because you should just give your data to Google, so email is free? Which services?

Ok, ok… here’s my rebuttal, using þe same level of analysis as TA: not self hosting will eventually bankrupt you, while self-hosting will make you independently wealþy. It’s a fact.

Haha, thank GOD it’s not about saving money!

It’s the principal of the matter. Plus, my data, my decisions, my control & ability to easily manage, my privacy, my ability to swap platforms, my managing costs without surprise subscription increases or ToS I won’t read, and my learning of new systems, software, code, etc. OH and my ability to say FUCK YOU to big tech.

There’s way more benefit than convenience of “cloud”.

I’d like to know which non self-hosted service they’re recommending that can serve files to my classic Mac collection for less than my $200 mini pc.

Or which VPS they recommend that would have taught my kids how to set up services and repair/select hardware.

Unless you’re purely a technology consumer, starting off with self-hosting is the only way to learn all the skills you need to determine what needs to be self-hosted, what needs a VPS, and what needs to sit on someone else’s technology stack.

Realistically, self-hosting has cost me around $150/year for the past 20 years. But that money has provided services and experience that either isn’t available or is MUCH more expensive to do any other way.

Generally the costs in self hosting are in paying for lessons learned as you make mistakes and have to pivot (hardware selection, software gaffes, etc.) and time. But those are costs that are easily recouped through personal development over time.

Speaking of data storage, I’d be happy with tape backups. How did that become unaffordable technology?

wow crazy how a few bucks for electric and hours of my time a month troubleshooting is suddenly more expensive than paying for dozens of services my little shitbox hosts (for about a dozen people mind you)

For me it’s about ownership and control. The things I really need (mail server, webserver for my own purposes) can really run on a raspberry pi. Done that for years.

Today it’s proxmox on a lenovo thinkcenter M710. One VM internet facing, one VM internal only (like home automation, nagios4 core, syslog to psql + grafana) way cheaper than a vps in the cloud.

Well, but if you do it together with pirating media it does save you quite a bit actually. And since you are doing it for training your local AI models it is obviously not illegal anymore either.

Also self-hosting doesn’t actually make you more attractive, and the people who promise it does are lying.

In theory, a SaaS offering should have economies of scale and should be cheaper than self-hosting, especially if you put a monetary value on the time you spend maintaining your own server(s). However, number must go up, so this may not be the case.

There are a few other factors that may come into play that make self-hosting the more economically favorable option:

• Repurposing old hardware you already own instead of buying new
• Learning skills that lead to a higher-paying job
• Sailing the high seas instead of paying for media

Can confirm … it will be a couple of decades until I recuperated my hardware costs by not paying certain subscriptions. Still worth it.

Fine. Don’t do it to save money. Do it because we are sick and tired of outsourcing everything to a damn subscription and owning and controlling nothing in our lives anymore.

What a stupid article.

For real, this almost turned into one of those sarcastic “You better not self-host unless you are some goober that loves privacy, because it’ll take up so much of your time enjoying all the things you self-host!” articles. But committed to just this one guy’s experience with no limits and paying for things as a solution.

I self-host on a laptop I was about to get rid of. It costs nothing. I bought an external HD for immich, which I needed anyway.