Disclaimer: I’m no expert on this.
I realized recently there are two common types of Self Hosters here.
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I work in IT and host some services for my employer so we don’t have to rely on the big tech companies, for economic or other reasons.
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I self host some services at home or on a VPS, as a hobby or for other reasons, but nobody pays me to do that.
The answers people provide seem to vary greatly based on whether the commenter is in the #1 or #2 camp. I myself have gotten answers along the lines of, “why aren’t you acting more like a paid IT person?” and it’s a little off-putting.
How to resolve this? Could we refer to one group or the other differently?
Maybe I’m making a bigger deal out of this than is warranted and I’m the only one confused?
If nothing else, I will call out my hobby status from now on when posting/commenting here.
Edited to add: TIL. I’ll use these terms carefully in the future. Thanks!
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Self hosted in this context is pretty well aimed at the ‘I do a service on my own time and usually own gear’ crowd. IT for a company is an entirely separate thing. Professional self-hosting would be more on a community like ‘serveradmin’.
Professional self-hosting was the way it was done until SaaS took off over the last 20 years - we just never called it that, because it was the only way to do things at the time.
Now we say things like Cloud or On-Premise. And as another commenter proposed, call it “Private Cloud” to sound fancy (wel, it’s not the same thing, but it sure sounds good!).
To my thinking, self-hosting means consumer-level hosting of services for a person, family, friends, generally at home, with VPS as an alternative server host.
If I have a closet with two Raspberry Pis running Docker Swarm, it’s a Private Cloud.
- On-prem
- Self-hosting
And I’ll argue it’s on-prem even if you don’t have the physical server in your building
Why do you distinguish on premises from self hosting? If the server is in a server farm or in my basement, I’m still hosting myself my services.
From Wikipedia:
Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of someone’s own control
A private web server is not defined by its location.
I would say that “on prem” defines a location, “selfhosting” an action. You can do both at the same time, e.g. selfhosting nextcloud onprem.
