Self Hosting
Running your own internet-connected services instead of renting them.
Self hosting is the DIY ethic applied to services: running and maintaining your own rather than relying on a third party. Individual, single-tenant servers push back against an internet monoculture and keep personal data where you can see it. Participating directly in the protocols of the internet is easy enough, it teaches you something, and it helps keep the network diverse.
It isn’t all-or-nothing. You might run your own web server and let somebody else handle DNS. You might let a host deliver your email while running your own source-code collaboration. Maintaining services for every corner of a digital life gets overwhelming, and hosting what you can while finding trustworthy people to host the rest is a perfectly good answer.
What I Host
- DNS servers
- A web server
- Uile, and the tools that talk to it
- An apt repository, so the fleet updates itself
- A Fediverse server
- Location logging and file sync
- Minecraft, for the family
Still on the list: an email server, Forgejo for source control, and PeerTube or Pixelfed if I ever decide to host my own media.