I never sat down and decided I was going to self-host.
There was no moment where I went, that’s it, I’m done with the cloud.
No manifesto. No rage about bills. No dramatic exit.
It just… happened.
I wanted more control over my stuff. I wanted to understand what was actually going on underneath. And one thing led to another, like it usually does.
The funny thing is, before self-hosting, I thought I understood the cloud.
I knew how to deploy things. I knew how to click through dashboards. I knew which service did what. I knew how to make things work.
What I didn’t fully appreciate was how much work was being done for me, quietly, all the time.
You only notice that once you start doing it yourself.
Self-hosting has this way of removing the illusion.
- There’s no “it just scales”.
- There’s no “high availability” unless you build it.
- There’s no “automatic backups” unless you actually… set them up.
And test them. And make sure you didn’t delete them because you were cleaning up old stuff and got a bit too confident.
Everything you take for granted in the cloud suddenly becomes very visible.
And honestly? That’s not a bad thing.
One of the biggest shifts for me was cost.
Not because self-hosting is cheaper. It isn’t always.
But because costs become boring.
You know what you paid. You know what you’re paying. You know why.
There’s no mystery line item. No “wait, when did this start?”. No calculator that somehow still gets it wrong once real traffic shows up.
Time becomes the real cost instead.
And you pay it gladly… until you don’t.
Privacy and ownership hit differently too.
Not in a paranoid way. Just in a very practical way.
When everything runs under your control, you stop wondering where your data lives or who technically has access to it. You don’t need to interpret policies. You don’t need to trust that defaults haven’t changed.
You are the default.
That sounds empowering. It is.
It is also responsibility, whether you like it or not.
This is where people online lose me a bit.
There’s this idea floating around that self-hosting is somehow easier, cleaner, or more correct than using the cloud.
It’s not.
If anything, it’s heavier.
You think about backups more. You think about failure more. You think about updates more. You think about what happens when things go wrong — because they will.
And when they do, there’s no one else to blame.
That part is uncomfortable at first.
Then it becomes oddly grounding.
What surprised me most was how much it changed the way I think.
- I stopped assuming systems will hold together on their own.
- I stopped trusting “small changes”.
- I started planning before touching things.
Not because someone told me to, but because I didn’t want to feel that sinking why did I not snapshot this feeling again.
Self-hosting has a way of teaching you consequences very efficiently.
And here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough:
Once you’ve tried to run things properly yourself, you stop looking down on the cloud.
You actually respect it more.
You realise that what you’re paying for isn’t just compute or storage, it’s the absence of a thousand small decisions you no longer have to make.
The cloud is not lazy. It’s deliberate.
Self-hosting just makes those trade-offs visible.
I wouldn’t recommend self-hosting to everyone.
- If you want things to just work, the cloud is the right answer.
- If downtime stresses you out, the cloud is the right answer.
- If other people rely on your setup and you don’t want to be on call the answer again is, the cloud.
Self-hosting is not about superiority.
It’s about curiosity.
And curiosity has a cost.
I don’t think there’s a final state where this feels “done”.
But I do know this:
Trying to own the whole stack, even imperfectly, made me more careful, more realistic, and more respectful of systems that actually work at scale.
And yeah, I’ll probably break something again too.
But at least I’ll know why.
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