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Comment by jmknoll

10 hours ago

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

  • Self hosting wasn’t popular nomenclature back then, but it was common for people to host web and mail on at home on DSL or even dial-up (ISDN or even analog if you were bold) 20-30 years ago.

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.

  • You can correct it

    • Which is what has been done in pieces and argued about 10000 times to make this abomination. I guarantee there is someone watching this article 24/7 that will revert it the moment you update it