Self-hosting is big, but mostly for personal use.

Self-hosting is going through a Renaissance of its own right now. Number of subscribers on r/selfhosted just surpassed 200k. Related communities and products keep popping up all around.

What's interesting is that a poll we ran in October, 2022 shows about 86.5% of people (552 out of 638 poll participants) in r/selfhosted host for their own, personal use.

Only 8.3% of community members self-host for an organization, either commercial or non-commercial. 5.2% self-host for their community.

Common use-cases for personal self-hosting are media (e.g. streaming from a personal library using apps like <a href="https://joingardens.com/tool/335">Jellyfin</a> and the ARR-stack), ad-blocking and smart home. Some people go further and self-host their own small-scale personal clouds using software like <a href="https://joingardens.com/tool/361">Nextcloud</a>, or manage their household with something like <a href="https://joingardens.com/tool/322">Grocy</a>.

We argue personal self-hosting is cool, but organizational self-hosting is also extremely important. In fact, while organizations of all kinds, non-profits, businesses, even governments, have been actively adopting SaaS, or hosted cloud services for many years now, self-hosting can be a better solution in many situations.

Self-hosting helps cut costs. Compared to a SaaS, where the cost is usually per seat, self-hosting either involves running on your own machine, which is a flat cost upfront, or renting a VPS, which is usually billed monthly or annually. The difference is significant. Even for a small company, paying for several SaaS services every month will accumulate into a significant expense.

&nbsp;Not to mention that self-hosting drastically improves privacy outcomes: you own your data. Self-hosting also allows for more flexibility, as organizations are not locked into proprietary SaaS solutions, and it's easy to migrate between tools.

One of the arguments against self-hosting is that there are simply more proprietary SaaS solutions out there. That's not entirely true. Where there was a shortage of self-hosted apps 10 or 20 years ago, there's now a <a href="https://joingardens.com/tools">wide variety of tools</a>, covering very different use-cases. You can find a good self-hosted alternative for almost any proprietary software product. Hell, it may even turn out to be more feature-rich, or have a better user experience.

Another popular argument against self-hosting is that using a hosted solution in the cloud allow for more flexibility and/or reliability, as cloud providers specialize in maintaining servers, and offer hosting in many different locations, allowing to host closer to the actual users of an app. 

But self-hosting is also possible in the cloud now. It doesn't have to be a big tech co. that you self-host with: as shown in the poll, many folks host for their communities. Universities often have their own cloud. Even hosting on a for-profit cloud can be tolerable though, if the software you use is open-source or fair-code, and if you're not locked in, meaning you can move your data to another provider at any time.

Hosting locally can also be legit for small-scale use. VPS costs tend to be higher than the costs of buying your own hardware, though savings with the latter option will only be realized over time.

How to start self-hosting for your own org

First, check out the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/bsp01i/welcome_to_rselfhosted_please_read_this_first/">intro to r/selfhosted </a>and the <a href="https://wiki.r-selfhosted.com/">self-hosting wiki</a>. Here, you'll get introduced to some basic concepts, and will find links to useful resources on the topic.

Next, decide whether you want to self-host locally (by buying a server and setting it up on your own) or in the cloud managed by someone else. We're publishing an article on pros and cons of both options soon.

If you decide to self-host in the cloud, check out <a href="https://joingardens.com/apps">our platform</a>. Gardens open-source, and we help you provision and configure your own instance, as well as deploy an admin application that allows to deploy any of our 130+ one-click apps or your own applications with or without code.

Regardless of how you do it, self-hosting helps you save costs, allows you to own your data, and frees you from being tied to a proprietary tool and the company behind it. Good luck!

Why Companies Should Self-Host More

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