Programming Blog July 23, 2024
Why I love personal hosting
What is personal hosting anyway?
Personal Hosting is what I call it when
I have my own domain name setup to point to a personal
instance of a piece of web software (for example, Matrix).
It differs from self hosting because that would
require me to also physically own the instance machines,
which I do not, since I host mine on Linode.
While that's a very minor distinction, it's still kinda
matters. There's good reasons to self host, most notably
that the hardware is much cheaper in the long run and
doesn't incur a monthly cost, as well as the fact that
messing around with the hardware itself can be quite fun. I
used to self host all of my stuff but it became quite
painful to manage, as my home internet isn't structured
around this capability.
Why move away from self-hosting?
Honestly, I probably won't stay away for long. While my
Matrix instance is in the cloud now, I would much prefer
everything but basic static HTTP serving of this site be self
hosted. My reasons for why should be fairly straight forward:
I don't want a limitation on my hardware imposed by my
monthly bill
I do want to mess with the hardware, I find it fun
The cheapest options in the cloud cannot handle much
more than static HTTP
If I need to test out a service, it's easier to test it
on my personal hardware than anything else
Obviously, I'm very supportive of self hosting. However, it
can also be extremely difficult to manage at times, especially
on days when I have other things to do, and I have a day job
that also needs to get done. It can also be slower; home
internet speeds where I live are not even 1 Gbps, like they
might be in or near some cities. Although, we're getting closer
to that dream. Regardless, at the time of writing, I'm probably
gonna spend more time in personal cloud hosting, for the time
being anyway.
You only vaguely answered the question?
I know. My point was that I support self hosting, but due to poor
circumstances, I'm not in a position to actually do it. I still
want the effect of personally owning my data, and personal cloud
hosting achieves this.
Announcement of Matrix
As you probably read in this article, I have a Matrix
instance now! It is not open for registration, but it should be
working fine if you wanna talk. @vlpatton:vlpatton.gay