Self-Hosted Main

For me selfhosting is all about privacy and rights on your data. If you can host it, you are responsible for the data and the only one (theoretically) able to read it.

For me, it is a balance between what I am trying to accomplish and the time/energy/maintenance I am willing to put into accomplishing that thing.

I used to self-host a personal website on Wordpress, but now I farm that out to a static site hosting provider because I would rather spend the time building the website instead of spending the same time maintaining the hosting.

I self-host a kubernetes homelab environment because that is a personal investment in skill that i don't want to pay exorbitant cloud prices for.

You don't sound stupid at all!

Before switching to Actual budget, I used YNAB. Just an app to install that works on my phone and on my PC.

It's all synced to the cloud so the same data appears on both devices.

But, I'm tied to YNAB's choices. They decided to increase prices, so I had to find something else.

Instead, Actual is completely controlled by me. None of my data with anyone else, no price, no subscription, no concern that changes will be forced on me that I don't like. It's all in my control.

That's why I would rather self-host a budgeting software than just install one.

Because the government will use my data to train the AI overlords.

Also because i can and enjoy running my own services and infra. Helps me land a better job and expand my skills

This is like asking why no speaks one language saying, " I don't understand how/why people speak different languages."

Tons of reasons, some geographical, some political to some biblical, and other just out of spite.

To answer your statement... Tons of reasons; some listed already but too many to state. I suggest you research more and it'll help you understand why.

My primary purpose was to host my own music server. Have tonnes od CDs and what not and ripped them all onto a media server. This then evolved to Navidrome, then Airsonic. It's like having your own, private Spotify. More music you add, woot.

Then, I wanted my DVD/Blueray collection on a server. A simple HTTP server hosts these, and Kodi both accesses them, and offers them up via uPnP for local hosts.

Then there are backups. A small NAS for these. Samba, SFTP, FTPS and even HTTP(s) upload capabilities.

Then using the web server to host some HTML generated from say Cron, to show stats of stuff.

The a logcat server. So everything can log to a central place.

An internal mail server, so local hosts can email their logs to the central logger. Weird some can email, but not syslog.

Then some influxdb to offload metrics from routers and hosts. Then a pretty dashboard from Chronograph and what not.

Everything else after, is just gravy.

Google recently had several cases of - which looks to be a developing situation - user personal data losses in the google drive side of operations

Thats right, the SaaS infrastructure that is based on storing user data on a cloud system lost about months of user data

Netflix recently also starting pulling toxic, egregious changes such that its basically insulting to people giving money to them

Mainly for control and privacy of our data so it doesn’t get stolen or others don’t bank off of selling our data

I have hardware laying around i decide to put to use. In the 3rd world a chatgpt subscription is the equivalent of $100 a month for very little benefit. Instead of queueing and using other people's free resources better to use my own. There are also other reasons like backup strategy using cloud, NAS and archives which require your own hardware. A 1U chassis can fit a chinese recycled board with decent specs, a gpu and 4 hot swap drives cheap. Does decently if you pair with good network hardware so you only wake it up when needed. I use mikrotik for networking. Ive come to a point where my skills are good and paying for the cloud is a big waste.

It's an evolution of services and data , those who can, self host. Those who don't self host, can - we don't discriminate here 😉

All views in this post are of my own even though they are hosted on Reddit servers subscriptions sold separately & Batteries not included.

Most people want services to be synced across devices. Using the budget app example, I just couldn't possibly do all of my budget tasks from my phone alone. It's too limited of a screen size and not all features are available within the app.

Privacy.

Those free (or even paid) apps on your phone are selling all of the data you give them to other companies.

It's mostly about syncing data between your different devices, without having to use a cloud service. I want to be able to organize the budget on my PC and look it up on my phone for example, without having to keep my PC running or manually sync them.

Another aspect is backups and redundancy. My NAS has all my data, and it does an encrypted cloud backup every night. I don't have to remember that or make sure it gets the latest changes, because it's always running and always up to date.

It's also just a fun little hobby to tinker with it and figure things out.

• easy to use with multiple people
• easier to manage for multiple people
• easier to backup (since you don't need to do backups per device)
• less hassle when you switch personal devices (or reinstall a laptop for ex.)
• You own your data (instead of a mega corp.)
• Less dependent on internet connectivity*, power outages*
• Its a nice challenge
• Its fun (some of us like the self inflicted pain that comes along with it ^sometimes)

*limited to outside factors like how much you actually self host and how much backup power you can store/generate.

I think most of the answers here are kinda lame. It's not easier to deal with networking rules or backups or flakey consumer grade Internet or power outages or redundancy or a lot of other things.

The only things I find value in self hosting are functional things for the home.. A bittorrent client with web front end, plex server, file server for the plex server, a home automation stack, or as a cheap sandbox for testing new software..

You'd save a lot of time and energy just using web or mobile based apps where appropriate. The day to day reliability of those kind of apps will be better as well.

If someone is doing this for a hobby, great. Enjoy. It's not practical for the overwhelming majority of people though. I say this as someone who's literal job is ensuring reliability of web services.. I am more than capable of doing all this but I'm also practical about seeing when it's a net benefit vs a time/energy suck.

Budget management app is not someone who starts with, its just oh i got a sever, i use a lot of other self hosted server, why not use a budget manager too.

Now is this better then app? of course!

1. now i can backup my data to 3 place

2. my parter dont need to install anything on there phone to see how much crap i am buying

3. i can automate things with n8n with my finance (i never did, but you can)

etc

And if you lose your phone, what happens to the data that's in that app if it doesn't sync somewhere?

It’s for that hit of dopamine every time I get an application to work.

I dont understand it either. I host on a VPS, because I trust my hoster more than my ISP and more than my own security-skills. Also its cheaper than running own hardware.

Self hosted budget management app is like more advanced user stuff rather than the normal users would do. So hosting that kind of things might sound very weird to you, I get that.

But it is more like a tendency. Most users start their homelab with very basic services like storage management, video streaming, photos, or note taking. There is a huge steep learning curve to run all of them safely and robustly, but once you get over it and there is a wide and very flat area you literally can do anything whatever you want.

Budge management app is like that thing. Many of us wouldn't start hosting budge management app, but we will get there eventually. Because we can.

Because connectivity today matters, namely yes I want an "app" to work on my current device but what if I want to use on another device? Share with family, friends, colleagues or even a random stranger? Then arguably hosting the app with its data is the most logical way.

You can host the data and/or the app that can be accessed cross-platform. If you're on someone else's PC be it linux, windows or mac you can pop open a browser and visit a url to access your app with the stored data. Or you could host the data and access it using the clients on multiple/different systems.

I'll add that sometimes the self-hosted version does something that the "official, paid"[1] version doesn't, or at the very least allows you to try to hack it together.

A problem with commercial offerings is that their idea of completed product is different than yours, and depending on the feature there's not enough $$$ incentive to pursue it. This is the major problem with Google, because search is such a ocean of income, that no other project will ever stand up to it.

[1] I say official because quite a few of self hosted versions are clones of some paid product.

Because we can. Just because we can.

There's a number of reasons. I would guess for most people here it's really about control of their data, which is a form of privacy. Making sure it stays on their network (ie: in their control) unless they approve it to go somewhere else.

There can be financial reasons (eg: backing up 10s or hundreds of terabytes to the cloud can get expensive), practical reasons (poor Internet access, especially internationally), latency/performance reasons (home automation). Sometimes you'll also get better interoperability with selfhosted stuff since exporting data is usually trivial and there's no walled garden lockin. And that's not everything, just a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head.

But you're right that some of these are often not the case. It can easily become more expensive (depending on how you account for things), it's definitely more work & it's never as easy as "just install and app and create an account".

Finally we can't forget that a not insignificant number of people here are aspiring (or actual) sys admins. This is a GREAT way to learn the trade if that's your thing.

Honestly I would say most of it’s just to do it because you can and also because you get experience in doing all these things that can translate to work. I would say I have a lot more container and virtual machine experience than majority of the people at my job and can explain it better than them.

Learning by doing is the main example most people will selfhost things. For example why would you want to solve a puzzle if you can buy it ready made? Why building a statue of lego bricks and not buying the built statue? Because learning about something you like is fun and you gain experience from that which might be beneficial for your present or future job.

Also some consider data privacy more than others. With selfhosting you own your data and not the company behind it. Why should I make an account for a recipe app if I can selfhost it and not needing an account? Why sharing my private information with some random tech company?

There are a lot of things people want to accomplish by selfhosting.

For me it's mainly the fun. I'm less privacy minded than other people here but I'm sure that I will be happy to own all my data at some point in time.

This is like asking why do you cook your own food at home.

I self host because I know what I am getting, I can control the price I want to pay, and I don't really need to involve other people in my life.