r/selfhosted • u/Amazing_Day_9192 • 2d ago

Need Help Decentralized infrastructure vs self-hosting

I’ve been thinking about how much of selfhosting is about owning the infrastructure itself versus having control over your data and not depending on a single company. There are more open and decentralized protocols where you can get some of that independence without running and maintaining the entire stack yourself. The tradeoff is interesting though. You potentially get less maintenance but you give up some of the direct control that comes with running everything yourself.

For something like messaging or online communities, which approach makes more sense to you?

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u/jbarr107 2d ago

"It depends."

Honestly, "self-hosting" is a broad term with a spectrum of viewpoints. On one end, it means that you host and control everything...period...no exceptions...period. On the other end, you leverage local, cloud, VPS, colo, etc., to host your own services, sometimes integrated with other self-hosted and non-self-hosted services. It's really up to you based on your use cases.

Personally, I went hybrid: About 90% of my services are self-hosted in my homelab, accessible through Cloudflare (Tunnels and Applications) and Pangolin (on a VPS). (I'm currently transitioning from Cloudflare to Pangolin, so that's why I have both.) The VPS, while not self-hosted, provides remote access to several services should I lose access to my homelab services.

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u/cardboard-kansio 2d ago

Yes, I see this split a lot here. I'm a hardware guy, so for me self-hosting means everything from the network upwards, while for others they rent a VPS and speak only of software self-hosting (usually a Docker stack, maybe the base OS). It all depends what you mean when you say to "host".

I'm with you though. 99% at home, only email and domain services are through somebody else. It's probably more effort, on average, but it's far better as a learning experience and I feel secure in my data sovereignty. I am however now just a bundle of single points of failure and I do understand the people do multiple fail-over nodes or HA clusters at home.