Created: 2025-08-06 Last Updated: 2025-08-06 Stage: seedling
Self Hosting
I am interested in moving away from commercial SaaS applications and self hosting the tools and applications I need. However, I see lots of challenges to doing so. The obvious challenge is the cost related to provisioning, operating, and maintaining my own infrastructure. There is less obvious challenge around the skills needed to build and maintain the infrastructure and applications.
Most commercial cloud providers are too expensive for home use. A cloud bill that is several hundred or thousands of dollars a month isn’t sustainable for most families.
Similarly, I suspect most families only have one person who has the skills needed to maintain the self hosted systems. If something happens to that person that prevents them from being able to work on those systems, the rest of the family is stuck.
Community Hosting
This could be an opportunity for some sort of community non-profit or co-op. A community group could pool the skills of multiple computing professionals to build and support systems, and provide cloud-like services at or near cost. The two challenges I see for this model is getting enough skilled people to volunteer to maintain the systems, and coming up with a plan to ensure users don’t abuse the system.
A good article on community hosting: The Future is NOT Self-Hosted
