Hi everyone,
I’m a PhD student in Computer Science researching why people choose to self-host software—what motivates you, what concerns you, and what factors affect your decision-making.
To better understand this, I’ve prepared a short anonymous survey (~10 minutes). Your insights as part of the self-hosting community would be incredibly valuable for this research.
🔗 Survey link: https://survey.lpt.feri.um.si/376953?newtest=Y&lang=en&s=ls
This study is part of my doctoral research at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, conducted under the supervision of Assist. Prof. Lili Nemec Zlatolas, PhD. All responses are anonymous and used strictly for academic purposes.
If you’ve ever self-hosted anything—or even just considered it—I’d really appreciate your input.
Thanks a lot for your time, and feel free to ask me anything about the project (luka.hrgarek@um.si)!
Cheers!
I submitted a response but if i may give some feedback, the second portion brings up:
This seemed out of place because there were no other value related questions (iirc). Such as:
I’m sure you could also think of more. But i think it’s pretty important because between cloud service providers and any non-free apps you want to use, it can be quite costly compared to the cost of some hardware and time it takes to set things up.
The rest of my responses don’t change but if you’re wanting to understand the impact of money in all of this, i think some more questions are needed
Best of luck!
I can add to the voices here that have this as one big consideration. With some second-hand hardware, it’s very cheap to set up almost unlimited cloud space for personal use.
That, and a lot of questions about ease of use too, but I answered them neutral because some are bears to set up, others are one click. Idk it depends.
And unless you are expecting significant traffic, you can use an old Core2Quad with 2GB RAM and it will work just fine.
Not to mention that a lot of self-hosting can be done on hardware you already had laying around.
And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.
My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.
My only quibble would be to swap “pay” for “invest” which captures both the dynamic of up front expense and expected savings from ending recurring subscription fees. That’s how I look at it. Every penny I put into my own digital sovereignty is an investment that will yield returns both financial and otherwise.
I saved money by stea- I mean borrowing - work equipment
Second this - so far it has cost me money, but as I am able to cancel more subscription services, the savings will add up.