Disclaimer: I’m no expert on this.
I realized recently there are two common types of Self Hosters here.
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I work in IT and host some services for my employer so we don’t have to rely on the big tech companies, for economic or other reasons.
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I self host some services at home or on a VPS, as a hobby or for other reasons, but nobody pays me to do that.
The answers people provide seem to vary greatly based on whether the commenter is in the #1 or #2 camp. I myself have gotten answers along the lines of, “why aren’t you acting more like a paid IT person?” and it’s a little off-putting.
How to resolve this? Could we refer to one group or the other differently?
Maybe I’m making a bigger deal out of this than is warranted and I’m the only one confused?
If nothing else, I will call out my hobby status from now on when posting/commenting here.
Edited to add: TIL. I’ll use these terms carefully in the future. Thanks!
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Self refers to oneself as in, a person. I never associate selfhosting with a company which runs their own servers. Technically they do self host but is it a company asking questions on an online forum and referring to itself as oneself? Is a company a person? What is a company even? Philosophical questions we dont have time to discuss.
To me, self hosting means a person is self hosting things. Some have racks and use 1kW of power on idle, some have micro servers. In any case, just one paragraph explaining what you have at the top of a post is sufficient to get the point of what you know across.
Id say a more important distinction is persons who self host software only (VPS) and those who do hardware as well.