Comment by simonw
6 hours ago
Sure, but CDNs for static content feel to me like effectively a solved problem in 2025.
There are plenty of good providers and some of them are practically free.
I mean sure, if you want to roll your own CDN by hosting boxes in colos across multiple continents and applying geographical load balancing via DNS you're taking on a whole lot of extra complexity, but I think outsourcing that to Cloudflare or Fastly or Fly.io or whomever is a reasonable strategy that still counts as "self-hosting", at least in comparison to using YouTube.
I want self-hosting to mean only hosting (as in, speaking HTTP) from servers that I control. I acknowledge this is not exclusively how the term is used any more, but I do think it’s still at least a preferable goal.
I want to self-host things. Currently I use a VPS. I’m planning on trying out hosting from home. Either way, if I get into doing much multi-megabit-per-second video stuff, hosting of that bit will definitely be going behind some CDN.