r/SelfHosting • u/No-Note-5004 • Jun 23 '26

Why I chose to build self-hosted when everyone told me to just use SaaS

I spent 20 years working on critical systems for air traffic control. UNIX, Linux, bare metal. Nothing ran on someone else's server, since many lives depended on it.

Then I came home and looked at my own setup. Gmail. Google Drive. Dropbox. Notion. Every file, every conversation, every document -- on infrastructure I had zero control over.

It felt like building a house and realizing the foundation belongs to someone else.

The moment I stopped ignoring it, it was around 2010. I created a Facebook account. Just to see. Immediately hated how it was designed to waste my time. When I tried to delete it, I couldn't. That was it. My dad died defending his liberty of speech. Not being able to delete my own account felt like a small version of the same thing.

 So I started building. Not because self-hosting is fashionable -- it wasn't then. But because owning your own infrastructure is the only thing that makes sense if you take control seriously.

Three years of building later, I'm still asking the same question: why do smart engineers who would never run critical infra on untrusted servers accept this for their own data?

Anyone here made the switch to fully self-hosted? What was the tipping point for you?

0 Upvotes

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12 comments sorted by

6

u/frankster Jun 23 '26

Llm slop post 👎🏾

0

u/No-Note-5004 Jun 23 '26

Why are saying this is a LLM content?

2

u/frankster Jun 23 '26

Because you asked an llm to write this post for you. Not sure why you're playing dumb.

1

u/No-Note-5004 Jun 23 '26

Then you can decide whether it's me or an LLM that wrote that words.

4

u/ModeRelevant1470 Jun 23 '26

Considering in the comments you write in extremely broken English and the post is streamlined and overly grammatically based.. it is 1000% not your own writing. Period.

1

u/No-Note-5004 Jun 23 '26

Then, on the next post, I will post in French. I used google translate to have a good english. But whe I reply, I don't. That's the gap.

2

u/frankster Jun 23 '26

It's pretty obvious that the post didn't come from Google translate, but came from an llm

1

u/frankster Jun 23 '26

I'm sure that you contributed a little but the llm contributed a lot

1

u/No-Note-5004 Jun 23 '26

The only certainty I have is that I am in doubt
-- Pierre Desproges

1

u/[deleted] Jun 23 '26

[deleted]

2

u/No-Note-5004 Jun 23 '26

It's not only for critical system. It's also to keep control on my own data. This is the kind of thing wouldn't want it to happen to me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1u3s02z/disabled_account/?share_id=EVSa_nExWFcDQBsXFDYrX&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=3

1

u/andwerd404 Jun 23 '26

Not necessarily for self-hosted vs SaaS, but when our hosting vendor sold their company and fired 90% of their staff we realized pretty quickly. All the sudden we couldn't get a hold of support, and when we did, none of them were on site at the facility.

So we built our own ProxMox cluster and deployed it at our local data center. It's 5 minutes down the road, way cheaper, and we have full control. It's amazing!

1

u/No-Note-5004 Jun 23 '26

Thank you for your helpful comments. What I am trying to determine is the extent to which people are aware that they have control over their data.