I have a raspberry pi I keep at my mom’s house and it’s completely managed by me. We live in different states. Would you classify the services on it as self hosted or no? I do not have immediate access to the physical hardware, I am at the mercy of my mom’s power and internet. When it’s all working I can access my services and data on it. Is she hosting or am I hosting it from her place?

If I rent rack space and install my servers in a data center and have physical access and ownership of the server but not the data center infrastructure. Am I hosting or is the data center hosting?

My point is that “self hosting” seems to have many different forms and there must be some minimal classification that allows inclusion without being overly strict.

For the record I practice all forms with servers at home and elsewhere.

The logic seemed sound to me. If you have to go home to access then you are no longer hosting it if hosting means to serve to the outside. If you are dependent on an ISP or power company to host then an argument can be made that either youre not self hosting or that self hosting allows the inclusion of a third party. If you are giving a pass to include a third party, then having a cloud provider could be seen as a third party to self hosting.

If making the service accessible from the outside is not a consideration for self hosting, then is running a desktop application considered to be self hosting if youre sitting at the computer it’s running on?

What’s UpDog?