I Self Host Not Because I Have a Fetish About It

There is a slightly strange assumption around self-hosting. If you run your own services, host your own fonts, operate your own server, keep your own files or avoid sticking twelve third-party scripts into every web page, people sometimes assume you are doing it because you enjoy making life unnecessarily difficult. As if somewhere in my house there is a shrine containing a blinking Ethernet switch, a Debian installer and a framed photograph of systemctl.

I don't self-host because I have a fetish about self-hosting. I self-host because the alternative has slowly become ridiculous.

The Internet Wasn't Supposed to Work Like This

The internet is fundamentally very simple. One computer asks another computer for something: a document, an image, a font, a file, a stream. Somewhere along the way, large companies realised that the mechanics required to make that request also reveal information. An IP address, browser information, device characteristics, an approximate location, referring pages, timing information and behaviour can all become useful pieces of data.

None of this required the internet to become an advertising system. But once collecting information became profitable, almost every mundane part of using the web became another place where somebody could insert themselves into the connection. The basic machinery of the network became valuable because the network itself tells you things about the people using it.

It's Just a Font

Google Fonts is probably my favourite example because of how completely unnecessary the whole arrangement is. A website needs a font. The font is a file. The website already has a server. The obvious solution would therefore appear to be:

website
  └── fonts
      └── font.woff2

Apparently this was considered far too primitive. Instead we managed to turn typography into a third-party network transaction:

visitor
   |
   +---- your website
   |
   +---- Google
             |
             +---- please give me the font

The visitor wanted to read my website. They did not ask to establish a relationship with Google just because I happened to like a particular typeface. So I host the bloody font myself. Not because I believe every external HTTP request will cause civilisation to collapse, but because the external request simply doesn't need to exist.

And Then There Is reCAPTCHA

The same logic appears in more aggressive forms elsewhere. You have a contact form. Bots submit spam. Fair enough, that is a real problem. But somewhere we decided that the reasonable solution was to load code from one of the largest advertising companies on Earth and allow it to examine the visitor so that the visitor may send you three paragraphs of text.

Apparently asking a stupid question such as:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

was not technologically sophisticated enough. Personally, I would rather have a stupid question, a honeypot, some basic rate limiting and a little server-side sanity checking than turn a contact form into another surveillance opportunity.

Outsource Everything

The bigger reason I self-host has very little to do with any individual company. It is the philosophy underneath the whole system: outsource it. Someone else can host it, manage it, store it, authenticate it, analyse it, back it up and probably invoice you for it every month.

Initially this sounds perfectly reasonable. Why run your own mail server? Why host your own media? Why keep your own documents? Why operate your own website? Why store your own photographs? Somebody already has a service for that, and usually that service is easier.

That is the important part. These systems rarely take control from you by making things worse. They take control from you by making things easier.

The Slow Takeover

Nothing dramatic happens. There isn't a morning when somebody announces:

GOOD NEWS. FROM TODAY YOU WILL NO LONGER OWN ANYTHING.

It happens slowly. Your music becomes a subscription. Your films become a subscription. Your software becomes a subscription. Your storage becomes a subscription. Your backups become a subscription. Your books become licences. Your doorbell needs an account. Your thermostat needs somebody else's server. Your car would quite like your credit card details.

Even hardware increasingly arrives with features already physically present but waiting for somebody in accounting to decide whether you are allowed to use them this month. Eventually you look around and discover that you don't actually possess very much. You possess permission.

And Most People Don't Notice

Not because people are stupid. Because life is happening around them. People are working, paying bills, raising children, caring for parents, listening to music, trying to sleep, fixing things, breaking things and generally dealing with all the normal noise of being alive. Nobody is sitting at the kitchen table carefully documenting every tiny transfer of ownership and control in their digital life.

That is why this works so well. The change happens slowly enough that every individual step feels harmless. One application becomes a subscription. One local file becomes cloud storage. One device requires an account. One website loads one more third-party service. None of these things feels particularly important in isolation.

Ten years later the landscape is completely different, but there was never one dramatic moment where everybody agreed to the change. It simply became normal while the rest of life was happening.

Permission Can Be Revoked

This is one of the things that bothers me most about the subscription version of computing. Ownership has quietly been replaced with access, and access sounds almost identical until somebody changes the conditions.

The price changes. The company gets bought. The service shuts down. Your country is no longer supported. Your account is flagged. The API disappears. Yesterday's free feature becomes tomorrow's premium tier. Nothing you built changed. Somebody else's business model did.

When you own the file, the file does not wake up one morning and announce that it has moved to the Enterprise Plan.

Convenience Has a Half-Life

Outsourcing is not inherently bad. I use services. Everybody does. Running absolutely everything yourself would be an excellent way to spend the remainder of your life maintaining TLS certificates while everybody else goes to the beach.

The problem begins when outsourcing stops being a decision and becomes the default architecture of your entire digital existence. There is a difference between saying, "I don't want to operate this," and saying, "I no longer know how this works without somebody else's platform." That second sentence should worry us more than it apparently does.

You Gradually Stop Knowing How Anything Works

There is another cost to outsourcing everything. Over time, you stop doing things, and when you stop doing things you eventually stop knowing how those things work. Your files exist "in the cloud." Your website exists "on a platform." Your music exists "in an app." Your photographs exist "in your account." Ask where the actual data is and suddenly we have entered forbidden knowledge.

This isn't merely nostalgia for an era when everybody configured sendmail incorrectly. Understanding where your things are, how they work, how they are backed up and how to move them somewhere else is a form of independence.

You don't need to understand every layer of every system you use. But completely surrendering that knowledge creates dependency, and dependency has a habit of eventually becoming somebody else's revenue stream.

Self-Hosting Is a Very Small Refusal

I am not under the illusion that my little Debian server is bringing global capitalism to its knees. Google has presumably survived the devastating financial impact of me hosting four WOFF2 files myself, and Amazon's shareholders remain frustratingly solvent despite the fact that I have an Apache configuration.

Self-hosting is not a revolution. It is a tiny refusal. A refusal to accept that every simple technical problem requires another corporate intermediary. A refusal to make every visitor to my website interact with companies they never chose to interact with. A refusal to turn every possession into temporary access. A refusal to forget how the machinery underneath all this actually works.

I Don't Need to Own the Internet

I just want to own my little bit of it. My files, my server, my music, my backups and my website. And when somebody visits that website, I would prefer the connection to remain between them and me unless there is a genuinely good reason for somebody else to be standing in the middle.

That used to be an entirely ordinary description of how the internet worked. Apparently now it qualifies as self-hosting extremism.

Fine. I'll be over here hosting my own fonts.