Self-hosting is having a moment. Ethan Sholly knows why. - Ars Technica

As you might expect I do some self-hosting myself, but you also may be surprised that I do a lot less of it than people may think. Why? In the short term this stuff is not that hard, and even fun for folks like me, but the long term support is where challenges come into play. Right now I have two Synology NAS devices that each have 16TB of storage and mirror each other. They are both 9 years old and need to be replaced. I’m so not looking forward to the cost of the replacement, but even more I’m not looking forward to migrating 10TB of data from the old devices to the new, managing the synchronization settings across the devices, and insuring I did it all right!

The reasons to self-host are real and chief amongst them for me is privacy. I dislike the fact that everytime I stream anything I know that multiple companies know that, and even more they know where I started and stopped, and that we paused at that point, for 3 minutes, and then resumed. It is just damn creepy. At our cabin we have a record player and more often than makes sense I think to myself when playing a record how novel it is that no company, no algorithm, no system knows that we are listening to the Foo Fighters right now. It fills me with joy actually.

Why can’t we have the benefits without the surveillance? The lack of privacy laws. We have nothing. No protections at all. So we are in a terrible bargain of complete surveillance or you have to replace the 16TB of hard drives and deal with all those challenges.

This is unacceptable.

So for me I have to pick my battles. Mostly I hope to pay for cloud services and the money removes the surveillance. But many times it does not.

Self-hosting should exist and is good for some folks, but it shouldn't be the only way for us to have privacy.