This is purely for my own personal curiosity, but what’s the main reason you self-host? I say main because I don’t know how to allow multiple answers, if that’s possible at all. For me it’s the last option; because it’s cool. If it’s none of these reasons, absolutely make additional options in the comments.
@ mods, if this in any way breaks any of the rules or just generally detracts from the sub at all, I’ll gladly remove it. Also I didn’t flair it because none of the flairs seem to fit.
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It’s all of those. I’m not voting because I can’t decide what the biggest reason is, and there is no “two or more of the above” options to pick from.
The only one I don’t think applies to me is “Better Services” as many of the open-source/self-hosted solutions aren’t necessarily better than commercial options. Or they’re missing SSO support in the free/freemium/open-source tier.
It can be all those reasons.
Freedom !!
variety of content. who wants to pay for five plus services because there’s not one that has everything you want to watch/read/listen to
Many years ago I finally got fed up with having my favorite tools for productivity becoming obsolete or just disappearing. It was at that point that I decided to base my entire workflow on simple text files. The development of clouds made it much easier to adopt lots of self-hosted tools that could be based on text files, such as some apps in Nextcloud.
For me it’s both Privacy, control and education.
The cloud is just someone else’s computer.
Cost and privacy. Currently selfhosting adguardhome. Something like nextdns or controld cost like $35-40/year. Mine cost nothing monetarily since its hosted on oracle cloud free tier. Only costed me like an hour or two of my time to set it up. Plus i don’t trust them enough to not sell my browsing habit.
I second this. My journey started with hosting Adguard Home. I needed an adblocker that would not need to run on my phone. Then, as I expanded, I discovered an entire world out there, that fulfills all of the OP’s choices. Now I run 2 separate servers, running a host of services. My wife, not a very tech-savvy person, also loves them as they are so simple, easy to use, and don’t randomly change.
TL;DR: Started out with a specific need, expanded for all of the above reasons and more.
Cool and better - It’s cool when you got something working in your house and it’s better when it’s in your hands, rather than companies which declare limitless free storage for photos and videos, and then after some time and tens of gigabytes they decide to stop uploading more data, limit max size for file and charge you to pay for this service.
Nah, I’ll rather just buy this cool mini PC, components and storage for it once and will not pay infinitely for that sometimes changing crap service.Stuff can disappear or stop being free at any time for no reason, with no notice.
Can I do all of the above?
What about “it’s a fun hobby” or “for learning purposes”?
i’ve got extra gear so why not put to good use?
Privacy, Education, Being Cool. Also, there are some services that are not available commercially.
There’s no option for “all of the above” and also no option for “I just want to see the results”.
Sheesh could have made it top 2 or 3. Talk about tough