A little over a week ago, a DNS update conflict brought down AWS, crippling hundreds of apps and services worldwide. Along with many of Amazon’s own platforms, Netflix, Spotify, Google Drive, Zoom, and many others were affected by the failure. At ground level, online shops went silent. One Reddit user lamented that they had missed out on thousands of dollars in profit because their trading platform couldn’t execute a trade, while another unlucky person’s bed stopped functioning.

This type of large-scale outage was more than just a one-off incident. In March 2024, a Facebook outage affected over 11 million users worldwide, causing the service to crash. Then, in July of the same year, a CrowdStrike failure caused critical security and public services to go dark. They were only the most notable examples among several other sporadic service disruptions from Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare — to name just a few in the past year alone.

If anything, these disruptions underscore that no service, no matter how robust or backed by substantial funding, is infallible. This is part of the reason why self-hosting has become such an interesting theme. All the tools and infrastructure you need to start a media server, remote desktop, or file-sharing service sit right at home, next to the user, where they’re shielded from global service catastrophes.

You set your own rules

Avoid slimy terms and conditions and random fee increases

The self-hosted Rust Desk remote desktop server running on a Raspberry Pi.

Perhaps more importantly, with self-hosting, we’re free from random subscription price increases, changes to terms and conditions, and nonsensical feature cuts. Remember when Netflix cracked down on account sharing, and family members living in another city suddenly lost account access overnight? Or how about troves of YouTube videos being removed due to malicious copyright claims or erroneous moderation? Yeah, unpleasant is putting it mildly.

Gain control over your data

Keep the data local, where it belongs

In addition to data privacy, self-hosted services are usually created by passionate volunteers who, rather than pursuing monetary gain, just want to build something useful. Although many of them prioritize function over form, with clunky user interfaces that are less than visually appealing, they’re often feature-rich, lightweight, and open source. That last aspect not only enhances security but also allows the community to add creative features to the tools they use themselves.

Learning is fun

There are tons of fun projects you can build and contribute to

Besides granting us more control over the services, self-hosting also helps reclaim some privacy. Decoupling our data from corporations means that no one is selling it to third parties, who, in turn, feed us ads that encourage overconsumption. If the self-hosted service only uses local data without needing to link to external services, there’s no need to pass out our personal and contact information, meaning fewer spam calls and junk emails. In addition, the service is typically shared among a select group of users (often an immediate circle of friends and family, or just with yourself). This reduces the risk of data leaks caused by large-scale breaches and unauthorized access.

Then there’s the fun and community building that comes with learning a new skill. With minimal tech experience in the hobby, I started self-hosting inside virtual machines, then moved on to Docker, and now I’m diving into container orchestration. Along the way (and countless mistakes), I’ve learned basic networking, VPN configuration, and many new commands in the Linux terminal and Windows Command Prompt. And when a problem is too tough to overcome, there’s always the community on Reddit, Discord, and Stack Overflow to lean on. Just recently, the devs of SparkyFitness, a self-hosted fitness app, helped me set up a server in my virtual machine.

Lastly, there’s the matter of cost. Self-hosting and creating a home lab certainly require an initial investment, but the setups are often durable and can last for years to come. The initial projects don’t have to be complicated, either. You can run a basic server on as little as a Raspberry Pi, which costs between $25 and $100 depending on the model. Projects can also run comfortably on old, retired PCs, and there are numerous self-hosted services that can be run on a NAS. Best of all, the software itself is often free and readily available on platforms such as GitHub.

Self-hosting increases digital independence

But dissociating from the cloud is near impossible

We can’t completely cut out cloud services. Slack, for example, is a critical part of many organizations. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our best.

As much as I’ve extolled its benefits, self-hosting can’t completely replace cloud services. Some, like fully-fledged search engines, just aren’t possible through self-hosting. Moreover, if a disruption occurs at the ISP level or to your home network, the service will still be cut off from remote connections. Because many self-hosted projects are open source, they tend to have slower update cycles, and it may take months to patch glaring issues.

Just like starting a business, the privilege of self-hosting also means you’re responsible for everything — from system maintenance to security to user experience. Additionally, when our lives are divided between a whirlpool of responsibilities, not everyone has the time to learn all the ins and outs of the tech stack required to set up a home server. But even in the face of these hurdles, when everything clicks into place and I connect to the server for the first time, few experiences are as rewarding.

Cloud services aren’t going away, but self-hosting lets you take back a bit of control. If you’re thinking about trying it yourself, don’t miss these five tips to get started the right way.