Replacing photo storage, note-taking, and news-reading services with a self-hosted solution on your home computer sounds very appealing: a one-time payment, your own data, and no one snooping on it. For the most part, that’s true, but it’s not the whole picture.
Items Not Listed on the Invoice
- Backups — a paid service takes care of this for you; if you host it yourself, losing your hard drive means losing everything if you don’t have a backup stored elsewhere
- Security updates — a service exposed to the Internet without patches is just a matter of time
- Downtime — a power outage while you’re away, with no one on duty
- Your attention — the most expensive resource, yet the one least often accounted for
How to Reduce Risk While Remaining Independent
Don’t open a direct connection to the Internet. A mesh or tunnel-based virtual private network (VPN) allows remote access without exposing any ports to the outside world—this is the change that reduces risk the most with the least effort.
Back up using the three-copy rule: three copies, two different types of media, and one copy stored off-site. And most importantly: test restores regularly, because a copy that’s never been tested for restoration isn’t really a copy.
Choose fewer services but run them well. Ten half-hearted services are worse than three services that are well-maintained.
A test to consider before self-hosting anything: If it breaks while you're away on a business trip, would you be okay with that?
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