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His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.

Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.

Self-hosting is often sold as a way to cut subscription costs. Running your own services and canceling SaaS plans can help keep more money in your pocket, and in practice, it does accomplish that. Just not right away.

Between hardware, power, storage, backups, and the occasional replacement part, self-hosting can cost more than simply paying for cloud services. And yet, I still think it’s entirely worth the hassle. Not because it’s cheaper, but because it fundamentally changes how much time you lose to friction, interruptions, and other people’s systems. Once you stop judging self-hosting purely by dollars saved and start evaluating it by hours recovered, the value proposition looks very different.

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Control saves times in ways that the cloud simply can’t

When you control all aspects of the experience, you save time

The biggest time savings from self-hosting comes from owning the entire stack. When something goes wrong, there’s no mystery about where to look. The logs are entirely local, the configurations are yours and performance characteristics are your responsibility, so you know what to expect.

With third-party services, downtime often turns into a waiting game. You refresh a status page, search forums, or open a support ticket and hope the issue is acknowledged. Even if the outage isn’t catastrophic, the uncertainty itself consumes time. You can’t fix what you don’t control.

While fixing it becomes your responsibility when you’re self-hosting, you can be sure you’re not blocked by vendor response times or vague support instructions. You can troubleshoot it yourself, apply the fix, and move on with your life. Even when something breaks badly, the time spent is directed toward resolution instead of diagnosis by guesswork.

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Stability is your responsibility

And when it’s taken care of, you remove friction

While fixing things is your responsibility when self-hosting, you can avoid most minor and mundane irritations simply by setting your services up the way you want. Your self-hosted storage won’t redesign its UI overnight, shuffle features behind new pricing tiers, or deprecate features you depend on.

Automation compounds this effect. Backups, renewals, health checks, and monitoring can all be handled once and essentially forgotten, until you want to make changes. Instead of periodically re-learning how a service wants to be used, you operate inside an environment that behaves predictably.

Centralization matters here, too. When multiple services live under one roof (often orchestrated with platforms like Proxmox or Docker), you reduce context switching. One authentication flow, one monitoring stack, and one "mental model" for how things all fit together.

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Setting things up takes time upfront

The time spent at the start is very real

The strongest argument against self-hosting is also the most obvious one: it takes time. Often a lot of it.

Initial setup can be slow and frustrating if you’re unfamiliar with the process. Even if you are, hardware issues, networking quirks, storage decisions, and security considerations all demand close attention. A poorly designed setup can easily turn into a maintenance treadmill. Updates and patching also don’t just disappear because you’re self-hosting, but instead, they become your responsibility.

For many people, cloud services are faster simply because they never think about them. If something breaks, it’s someone else’s problem. If a feature changes, they adapt and move on. That’s totally fair, but I still think the time saved in the long run is worth it.

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Why the investment pays off

In both dollars and time spent

Self-hosting is a hobby that’s front-loaded. The early stages are slow because you’re building foundations: understanding your environment, designing workflows, and learning how systems interact. Once those foundations are in place, the time cost drops sharply. Each additional service becomes easier to deploy than the last, and all the knowledge transfers instead of resetting. When something breaks, the fix tends to be permanent rather than a temporary workaround for someone else’s platform. You can definitely run into situations where your issue is totally unique, but like many things in tech, there’s a good chance that someone out there has had the same issue as you.

Cloud services rarely offer that kind of compounding return. Every new tool introduces a new dashboard, a new set of quirks, and a new learning curve. Even when individual services save time, managing many of them often does not, especially if something goes wrong with it that’s outside of your control.

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Time is the real ROI

Self-hosting didn’t necessarily save me any money, at least not yet. The amount I’ve invested in it isn’t totally lost by any means, because it completely eliminated a steady flow of annoyances and interruptions that cloud services imposed upon me. The value can’t really be measured in dollars, and while I have no idea exactly how much time it has saved me, I don’t regret spending the money to set it all up in the slightest.