Disclaimer: I’m no expert on this.

I realized recently there are two common types of Self Hosters here.

  1. I work in IT and host some services for my employer so we don’t have to rely on the big tech companies, for economic or other reasons.

  2. I self host some services at home or on a VPS, as a hobby or for other reasons, but nobody pays me to do that.

The answers people provide seem to vary greatly based on whether the commenter is in the #1 or #2 camp. I myself have gotten answers along the lines of, “why aren’t you acting more like a paid IT person?” and it’s a little off-putting.

How to resolve this? Could we refer to one group or the other differently?

Maybe I’m making a bigger deal out of this than is warranted and I’m the only one confused?

If nothing else, I will call out my hobby status from now on when posting/commenting here.

Edited to add: TIL. I’ll use these terms carefully in the future. Thanks!

  • ShellMonkeyAEnglish
    28·
    10 days ago

    Self hosted in this context is pretty well aimed at the ‘I do a service on my own time and usually own gear’ crowd. IT for a company is an entirely separate thing. Professional self-hosting would be more on a community like ‘serveradmin’.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
      15·
      10 days ago

      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.