If you want some extra budget start calling it Private Cloud instead of on prem so when your bosses get calls about cloud strategies you can say we already do cloud and we don’t need their particular product.

Why do you distinguish on premises from self hosting? If the server is in a server farm or in my basement, I’m still hosting myself my services.

From Wikipedia:

Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of someone’s own control

A private web server is not defined by its location.

Agreed, I would definitely not refer to the first one as self hosting without qualifying further.

I’ll argue it’s on prem even if it’s hosted in azure behind a private v-net

Professional self-hosting was the way it was done until SaaS took off over the last 20 years - we just never called it that, because it was the only way to do things at the time.

Now we say things like Cloud or On-Premise. And as another commenter proposed, call it “Private Cloud” to sound fancy (wel, it’s not the same thing, but it sure sounds good!).

To my thinking, self-hosting means consumer-level hosting of services for a person, family, friends, generally at home, with VPS as an alternative server host.

And 2d, who self host on a server/VPS they rented somewhere.

/j hey some of us only have 10GbE

Jokes aside, I get the classification. I’m pretty solidly in the category of 2c - more tech than some medium business but without the SLA to go with it.

You forgot the “basement dwelling gatekeepers”, there are the ones whose minds never left their parents basement and whose social skills aka lack thereof is evident in their gatekeeping.

Their way is the only correct way and Linus has actually no idea how to run Linux, hardware manufacturers don’t know anything about their products, anyone using not their service of choice is automatically an idiot and if you don’t know how to compile xyz yourself by using a self taught technique you really should get off the internet right now.

Often their advice is inefficient, sometimes it’s outdated and some even blatantly lie (had one boast in a discord that he has a myriad of secret user accounts where he intentionally gives bad advice to a FOSS product he hates).

Some also intentionally make whatever the goal is appear much harder in an effort to look smarter (that behaviour is often found in the professional world as well*)

They are the cancerous sore of FOSS and social media,imho.

PS: Anecdote: I work in healthcare,not IT originally. Everything I know is self taught, therefore. Started a new consulting gig and one of these guys, very much a “IT gatekeeper” always made the company he worked for think it takes a massive effort to install a certain product. Which made everyone’s life much harder because yes,he did install it, but he manually compiled it which took him weeks at a time, while his other work piled up. So they tried not to use this essential product whenever possible and worked their way around it.

I came there, saw that I needed said product and had it installed within 20min. The CEO sat right next to me and was stunned. “You prepared that, right?” “Uhm,no? You can just download and install it like this?”

IT-Gatekeeper was asked to join the meeting asap and told to explain why they need so long. His only excuse was “I need to review all the code” - which he did diligently, but he always reviewed ALL the code not only changes, according to his notes.

I made the mistake of saying to myself a bit to loud “but if you compile that stuff yourself then you are liable if it breaks,if you use the advised packages from the manufacturer they are”(medical device law can be interesting). IT-Gatekeeper exploded and screamed at me how I have no idea how IT works,etc.

He was let go shortly after that.

This was my first thought. I’ve never said “self hosted” to a client and, honestly, never would. “On-prem” or “Running on your server.” The idea of a company “self hosting” something is literally just “hosting”.

This. Most app servers need to be isolated from the internet anyways so any license servers for activation or metrics or whatever needs to go on premises. Same thing with mail engines, is usually a few outgoing ports, heavily warded for the mail ip and everything behind all the opSec tools they can muster

Even AWS and GCP have on premises deployments were you basically create your own mini local region for banks and such

I agree. Definitely see more home hardware or cheap VPS related posts than work environment posts.

I think there are more people that are #1 and #2 the same time

Probably where some of the attitude comes from. People are assuming that it’s paid IT people bringing their work home with them, which is a different case then a casual user trying out self-hosting without the broader background.

Although I haven’t seen this attitude myself so I suspect it’s not that common, and probably just a handful of users jumping to conclusions.

… or if you accidentally delete all your photos with no backups

Ouch. (Yes, that was me)

but my homelab is held together with hope and scripts to recover when it goes down

That’s every IT guy. When I’m done with work, I’m sick of doing things right. If it works it’s fine. Where’s my duct tape