Comment by brainless

11 hours ago

To me, "self-hosted" means, either I use a rented hardware or I use a purchased hardware.

If the software can be switched to a rented or purchased hardware (I do not want Cloudflare's offering) then it is "self-host-able" IMO.

I think there are open source Cloudflare alternative hosting software.

There was a recent Show HN project that claimed to be 'self-hosted', and the installation included something like 6 service subscription dependencies. That's just a SaaS with more steps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting_(network)

  • That is a very poorly-written Wikipedia article.

    The first sentence states:

    "Self-hosting is the practice of running a website or service on a home server instead of a web hosting service outside of the administrator's own control."

    And then basically contradicts itself in the next paragraph:

    "The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines."

    In any case, I think the generally accepted definition of self-hosting has expanded over the years to include software that you're running on rented hardware in someone else's data center.

    • I think the opposite. 20 years ago self hosting almost always meant "in a data centre" but as home internet got better people started to think "or maybe in my basement" and now it's swung so far that a few think if it's not in your basement it's not self hosting

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    • I only use Wikipedia occasionally but this is seriously the worst article I've ever seen. It switches the definition between "running on my own hardware" and "running it in the cloud" multiple times. It's been pointed out in a discussion about the article several months ago but nobody bothered to correct it.

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