Comment on Installing **self-hostable** services on a cloud server isn't self-hosting ???
aichan@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
To me, it is not. If the internet or anything else goes down you lose all access. You are not hosting your services, so claiming to be SELF-hosting is not really accurate.
Furthermore, in the phylosophical aspect, you depend on a private company for all your infrastructure and are not doing anything against the centralization of the internet. To me, this is one of the core reasons I self-host. Maybe we need to make new terms for this, but allowing anything under the corporate cloud umbrella to be called SELF-hosting seems bad to me.
KaKi87@jlai.lu 3 days ago
That’s also the case when your home connection or electricity goes down and you’re not on site.
If that’s not a concern, then you don’t need to self-host, you just need a desktop app.
Joelk111@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This feels like a bad faith argument. If the internet goes down, I will be able to access my servers and my data. If those services were hosted in the cloud, I wouldn’t not be able to access my data at all. Obviously one is better than the other.
ready_for_qa@programming.dev 2 days ago
The logic seemed sound to me. If you have to go home to access then you are no longer hosting it if hosting means to serve to the outside. If you are dependent on an ISP or power company to host then an argument can be made that either youre not self hosting or that self hosting allows the inclusion of a third party. If you are giving a pass to include a third party, then having a cloud provider could be seen as a third party to self hosting.
If making the service accessible from the outside is not a consideration for self hosting, then is running a desktop application considered to be self hosting if youre sitting at the computer it’s running on?
Joelk111@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’m not sure what the disconnect is here. In both scenarios I’m reliant on an ISP. In the scenario where it’s on a data center, if my internet goes down or the data center goes down, I am shit out of luck. I am not capable of accessing my data. If it’s hosted at my house, I still have the ability to go home and access my stuff. One seems much better than the other to me. It’s the difference between being able to access your stuff and not.
aichan@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Conclussion first:
In any case, I would agree with what some other used said: What we care about in here, for the most part, is the software element of it. Even if I personally don’t consider using Cl*udflare to be self-hosting, all of us have similar info sharing interests, so this is just a terminology argument that does not really impact us that much
I wrote this first:
Actually, this is a pretty interesting thing to think about. To me, the key factor to distinguish what is hosting and what is not is the use of a server. I would say that internet connection is not a requirement for hosting, otherwise it seems absurd to deny that the servers of big LAN parties like the Euskal Encounter are not hosting anything, they clearly are. Down to the smaller scale, having a LAN only Minecraft server in your home server, I would say it still is hosting, even if only you and your family use it. Now, going to a non dedicated computer that is exposing it on LAN, is it self-hosting? I would say no, just because it also seems absurd that any single player world opening in LAN to enable admin suddenly is self-hosting, I say it is not.
But I guess this shows that there is a point where we need more specific definitions, there is some ambiguity.
A summary of my definition attempt:
- Internet access: Not required (big LANs and personal Netflix/etc beefy servers seem self hosting to me)
- Local access: Required (for the “self” part)
- Dedicated hardware: I don’t know. Normally I’d go yes, but someone serving a bunch of things in their computer over the internet could argue it is some low availability sel hosting lol
KaKi87@jlai.lu 2 days ago
Except one benefit of the datacenter is redundancy : it going offline is way less likely than your home Internet (or anything else it depends on) going down.
Joelk111@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Sure, but if stuff goes really south, I can still access the stuff on my hardware from my home. If stuff goes down, I cannot access the stuff in data centers, period.