No that’s a homelab. Selfhosted applies to the software that you install and administrate yourself so you have full control over it. If it was about running hardware at home we’d see more posts about hardware.

I’d say there are levels to selfhosting. Hosting your stuff on the cloud is selfhosting, but hosting it on your own hardware is a more “pure” way of doing it imo. Not that it’s better, both have their advantages, but it’s certainly a more committed to the idelal

Self hosting basically means you are running the server application yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s at home, on a cloud service or anywhere else.

I wouldn’t recommend hosting a social network like lemmy, because you would be legally responsible for all the content served from your servers. That means a lot of moderation work. Also, these types of applications are very demanding in terms of data storage, you end up with an ever growing dataset of posts, pictures etc.

But self hosting is very interesting and empowering. There are a lot of applications you can self host, from media servers (Plex, Jellyfin), personal cloud (like Google Drive) with NextCloud, blocking ads with pihole, sync servers for various apps like Obsidian, password manager BitWarden etc. You can even make your own website by coding it, or using a CMS platform like WordPress.

Check the Awesome Self-hosted list on GitHub, has a ton of great stuff.

And in terms of hardware, any old computer or laptop can be used, just install your favorite server OS (Linux, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, even Windows Server). You can play with virtualization too if you have enough horsepower and memory with ESXI or Proxmox, so you can run multiple severs at once on the same computer.

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For me it does. I’m sure some other people use a VPS or something and self host using a cloud provider of some kind.

Yep, big ol’ case under my desk with some 20TB of storage space.

Most of what I host is piracy related 👀

I pay Dreamhost for a beef pc VPS, that’s what “selfhosted” means to me. I host all kinds of shit on it.

For me, since you can get kicked off a platform eg hetzner vps, it’s not self hosted, they’re hosting you.

“Self-hosted” means you are in control of the platform. That doesn’t mean you have to own the platform outright, just that you hold the keys.

Using a VPS to build a Nextcloud server vs using Google Drive is like the difference between leasing a car and taking a taxi. Yes, you don’t technically own the car like you would if you bought it outright, but that difference is mostly academic. The fact is you’re still in the driver’s seat, controlling how everything works. You get to drive where you want to, in your own time, you pick the music, you set the AC, you adjust the seats, and you can store as much stuff in the trunk as you want, for as long as you want.

As long as you’re the person behind the metaphorical wheel, it’s still self-hosting.

I consider selfhosting to be both. VPS or homelab. The latter has more ‘cred’ but is also a much bigger investment and not everyone can do it. Granted I’m living in a difficult environment but as somebody using Linux since 1994 it took me 3 years to recently get a homelab to where I could credibly serve the wider internet from it, and I still use a VPS as reverse proxy anyway! Meanwhile, offloading your physical plant to a mom-n-pop platform-as-a-service provider isn’t the worst thing in the world. Some operators started out selfhosting and grew their little VPS provider from that, those guys need business too!

at least i do have 2 servers. one main and one backup

Most people who “self host” things are still doing it on a server somewhere outside their home. Could be a VPS, a cloud instance, colocated bare metal, …

I do both. I have a custom built NAS based on a Ryzen 3600 and ZFS across 4 drives which runs about 20 self hosted applications and stores the majority of my files but its only accessible from within the home. I also rent a small VPS for personal webspace and hosting self hosted apps I want out of the house.

In the past I have also hosted raw servers from Hetzner or bigger VPS from Amazon for the purpose of hosting a game server. Alongside those I often had community applications like website, forums, wikis and custom chat and voice comms services.

Its all self hosting to me since I run it. The various options are all about the trade offs of security, accessibility, cost and performance. The cheaper cloud options when you add it up can be cheap compared to buying and running your own hardware when you take into account electrical costs and the likely hardware replacement needs within 5 years. The big cloud providers aren’t price competitive but Contabo/Hetzner really surprisingly are especially if you pay a lot for electricity. But then if you need a game server it can be quite hard to find good fast CPUs on the cloud and its not going to be 24/7 for communities, so the trade off flips back to having your own.

Since I got 1 gbit/s fibre internet my need for internal NAS has definitely reduced as the internet is nearly as fast as the local network so I could now have my NAS needs remote.

I ran one for a few months until I woke up one morning and it wasn’t working. As I was the only person using it, I didn’t bother to troubleshoot and just signed up for an account at lemmy.world.

If you want to run your own I recommend you check out the ansible install route. It’s really simple and straightforward once you wrap your head around ansible.

There are definitely benefits on running a server at home but you could say the same of a VPS. As long as you control it, it is self hosted in my book.