Name
The keeper
A daemon detaches from the terminal that started it, is adopted by the first process, and runs until something stops it. It does not sleep, does not go home, and is answerable for the ground it was given.
Which is close enough to what it means to host a thing yourself.
Description
What self-hosting is
Running the software yourself, on hardware you control, on a network you control, with the data held somewhere you can reach without asking anyone. That is the whole definition. Everything after it is detail.
There is ground you keep, and ground you are let onto. Both can be pleasant to stand on. Only one is still yours when the owner changes their mind.
Rationale
Three reasons, and no others
| Ownership | Rented, you have access: a permission, granted by somebody, revocable by them. Kept, you have possession, which has to be taken from you rather than merely withdrawn. That looks like a distinction without a difference right up until the notice arrives offering thirty days to carry out ten years. |
|---|---|
| Understanding | You cannot learn a system you are only permitted to use. Keeping one means following a request from the front door to the disk and back, and being answerable for every hop on the way. Nothing else teaches that, and it transfers whole to the far larger version at work. |
| Enjoyment | It is fun. Most writing on this subject buries that under privacy and principle, which is dishonest. Plenty of people do this the way other people keep aquariums or rebuild motorbikes, and it needs no stronger justification than that. |
Caveats
What self-hosting costs
Attention, mostly. Nobody else notices the failed disk, renews the certificate, or reads the release notes before the upgrade that eats a Saturday. There is no rotation and nobody takes the watch. If that reads as a chore rather than a hobby, renting is a perfectly respectable answer and nobody serious will argue with you.
Some ground should not be kept at all. Outbound mail is the standard example and the honest one: deliverability is a reputation system you cannot win from a residential address, and it fails silently. Keep what you would grieve losing. Rent the rest without embarrassment.
Files
Backups, certificates, and written-down reasons
Three copies of anything that matters, on two kinds of media, one somewhere else. Restore one at random each month, because a backup nobody has read back is a rumour. Renew automatically, then watch the renewal, because automation fails quietly. Keep the configuration in version control with the reasoning attached. The diff says what changed. Only the message says why.
Redundancy is not backup. Mirrored disks defend against a drive dying and nothing at all against deleting the wrong directory at eleven at night.
What is on the shelf is not listed here, and neither is what any of it is called. A daemon that publishes the floor plan of its own house has misunderstood the assignment.
See also
Referred elsewhere
This page is about the grounds, not the person who keeps them.
- siythrun.com(1)
- The handle, everywhere else.
- daemon(3), fork(2)
- How a thing is made to stay running with nobody watching.
- signal(7), init(1)
- The vocabulary, and who adopts the orphaned.
siythrun@plebspalace:~$ whatis plebspalace
plebspalace (8) - notes on self-hosting, and on keeping a thing yourself
- covers
- self-hosting, home servers, storage, backups, networking, certificates, monitoring
- terms
- personal, non-commercial, no ads, no tracking, no cookies
siythrun@plebspalace:~$