Disclaimer: I’m no expert on this.
I realized recently there are two common types of Self Hosters here.
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I work in IT and host some services for my employer so we don’t have to rely on the big tech companies, for economic or other reasons.
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I self host some services at home or on a VPS, as a hobby or for other reasons, but nobody pays me to do that.
The answers people provide seem to vary greatly based on whether the commenter is in the #1 or #2 camp. I myself have gotten answers along the lines of, “why aren’t you acting more like a paid IT person?” and it’s a little off-putting.
How to resolve this? Could we refer to one group or the other differently?
Maybe I’m making a bigger deal out of this than is warranted and I’m the only one confused?
If nothing else, I will call out my hobby status from now on when posting/commenting here.
Edited to add: TIL. I’ll use these terms carefully in the future. Thanks!
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Self hosted in this context is pretty well aimed at the ‘I do a service on my own time and usually own gear’ crowd. IT for a company is an entirely separate thing. Professional self-hosting would be more on a community like ‘serveradmin’.
Professional self-hosting was the way it was done until SaaS took off over the last 20 years - we just never called it that, because it was the only way to do things at the time.
Now we say things like Cloud or On-Premise. And as another commenter proposed, call it “Private Cloud” to sound fancy (wel, it’s not the same thing, but it sure sounds good!).
To my thinking, self-hosting means consumer-level hosting of services for a person, family, friends, generally at home, with VPS as an alternative server host.
If I have a closet with two Raspberry Pis running Docker Swarm, it’s a Private Cloud.
- On-prem
- Self-hosting
And I’ll argue it’s on-prem even if you don’t have the physical server in your building
Why do you distinguish on premises from self hosting? If the server is in a server farm or in my basement, I’m still hosting myself my services.
From Wikipedia:
Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of someone’s own control
A private web server is not defined by its location.
I would say that “on prem” defines a location, “selfhosting” an action. You can do both at the same time, e.g. selfhosting nextcloud onprem.
Ignore the host part. It has to do with the definition of self. Self can refer to a person but it also can refer to a group like a company.
However, in IT you will mostly see the term on prem.
This. Most app servers need to be isolated from the internet anyways so any license servers for activation or metrics or whatever needs to go on premises. Same thing with mail engines, is usually a few outgoing ports, heavily warded for the mail ip and everything behind all the opSec tools they can muster
Even AWS and GCP have on premises deployments were you basically create your own mini local region for banks and such
