Does "Selfhosted" mean you actually have a server at home?

ProtecyaTec@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 195 points –

I'm trying to better understand hosting a Lemmy Instance. Lurking discussions it seems like some people are hosting from the Cloud or VPS. My understanding is that it's better to futureproof by running your own home server so that you have the data and the top most control of hardware, software etc. My understanding is that by hosting an instance via Cloud or VPS you are offloading the data / information to a 3rd party.

Are people actually running their own actual self-hosted servers from home? Do you have any recommended guides on running a Lemmy Instance?

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Selfhosting is the act of hosting applications on "hardware you control". That could be rented or owned, its the same to us. You could go out and buy a server to host your applications but there a few issues that you might run into that could prevent you from simply standing up a server rack in your spare room. From shitty ISPs to lack of hardware knowledge there are plenty of reasons to just rent a VPS. Either way youre one of us :)

But you don't control the hardware if you run it on a VPS?

You control the hardware you are provisioned and the software you run on it, which is enough for me. Unless you're looking for a job in the server adminstration/maintenance field the physical hardware access component of it matters less IMO

You definitely don't control the hardware. Someone else at some remote server farm or something does.

Some of them offer what they call bare metal provisioning and I wonder if some even offer ILOM type access. That’s pretty much control of the hardware for me. Just that you can’t plug in a disk or a memory stick.

If your server has IPMI, there's little difference between being there in person and not.