Selfhosted

Or if you have reliable home internet, just get/reuse a small PC and host at home.

But if you don't have a ton of users, you can host on a pretty cheap VPS.

Second racknard. If you Google Black Friday special, you'll find the page where you can order a VPS with four gigs of RAM for something like $50 a year. It's not a 12-month special either, you can renew it year after year.

I run docker containers there, a Red Dead redemption 2 server, etc. It's really useful commodity server to have around,

Just a PSA, never ever EVER request deletion of an Oracle free tier if there is any possibility you might want one in the future.

You can delete/remove instances or whatever as you desire, but you won't be able to get a second free tier account even if the first is completely deleted.

Their free tiers look nice, but I've read that your server must stay above X% CPU usage average to prevent deletion, is that true?

Did you upgrade your account to a paid one? I've read that this might help to precent from being deleted. Even with a paid-as-you-go account you're able to use the free tiers.

I got one. It's just too slow for what I need and can't do webrtc because of a hardware limitation.

Interesting, maybe I'll play around with that. I'm currently on a simple $5/month Hetzner VPS which does everything I need it to do, but maybe I'll try using it for experimental stuff (considering a Rust build server, for example).

They refused my visa during the onboarding, a bit surprising

Any caveats to it?

Already got one of those but thanks

The opposite of self-hosted would be managed service.

You run it yourself at your own location however you want it

Vs

Someone runs it for you at their location. However the want it

VPS is someone loans you a VM at their location that you run yourself however you want to.

It's still relevant to self-hosted because you still have to do all the work, you were just using their network, power, air conditioning, hardware and fire suppression. You're still in the hook for installs and patches, configuration, and software issues.

For me, self-hosting is about staying in control over your software and data, so I think hosting in a VPS still fits the bill, even if it isn't the way most people go about it

The opposite of VPS is more like “home lab”.

Managing a VPS yourself still counts as self-hosting.

This is one of those things where I think that purity might conflict with progress. I am currently using a VPS in a privacy-friendly country to host some stuff, and I am trying to move more of my needs there. I can easily try to host things at my house(and I do to a limited extent, I have a VPN I run through a VPS to connect my devices together to accomplish this), but dealing with the constraints of non-professional hardware management and a residential internet connection is frustrating. This frustration has in the past prevented me from reducing my use of services where I know they are farming my data, and would probably honor illegal and warrant-less data requests from government agencies. At least with IaaS, I give them money in exchange for a virtual machine, vs SaaS where I give them possibly money but more importantly permission to do whatever they want with my highly structured data(far easer to data mine a easily searchable database of PII vs a filesystem of unknown structure).

Even outside of tech, I have often found that my sense of purity gets in the way of actually making progress towards my values. Use the VPS if it will get you to stop using worse things.