You get this wrong. The expensive part isn't the tech at all. You can self-host a lot of things on a old laptop in a drawer while you access it via your routers wireguard VPN connection, without any domain renting.

The expensive part is aquiring the skills needed to pull that off.

I've always thought it would be great for the government to provide a free domain name for every citizen. There's really not much you can do without DNS.

Paying $10/yr for a domain is well worth the cost just to be free of attaching your entire digital life to a gmail etc account that can be easily taken from you with no recourse.

But beyond that self hosting is a hobby. It’s not nearly turnkey or cheap enough to justify unless you enjoy the process of self hosting itself.

There are other benefits outside the monetary equation of course like control of which the value is dependent on the self-hoster.

The one thing I desperately wish Umbrel shipped with was an easy way to network with other Umbrel users for backup and accessibility. Let people set limits in terms of how much storage they're willing to allocate to others. REQUIRE end-to-end encryption on backed up files. But help people create their own community micro-clouds using each other's computers.

To me, the risk of backing things up in one building is too high, but the inconvenience of going even somewhere else in my own town regularly enough to rotate my backups is too high. But if my family members and I could easily back up each other's systems from our various states? Or my group of dorky college friends who are now all over the world could easily share with each other? We'd be all over it.

I disagree. From experience (see my username), self-hosting is hardly expensive. A $50 ex-corporate SFF with a couple of large M.2 or SATA SSDs will be a lot more powerful and easier to set up and manage than a Raspberry Pi, while not drawing much power. The ongoing costs are larger than not self-hosting, but not terrible - unless you want a symmetric connection, the domain name renewal is the expensive part.

> for services that are already "free".

The problem is that people still believe that if they don't pay money, a service is free. But so many do not question why it is free. Hint: Not because Google just wants you to succeed and have a good life. And then, without any second thought, they literally upload their whole private digital life.

If you don't pay, usually, you're the product.

you went from 10USD to thousands in a few sentences.

self-hosting has a lot of degrees. if you want your own TLD and peer with Tier1s, then it's astronomical, woo! But using dynDNS is also an option.

Especially if you compare to non-self-hosted services. You get a subdomain and that's it. (Or nothing, maybe some handle on Instagram.)

> It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values

Unfair IMO. The author _did_ the hard work. And recognized that most other people, not similarly motivated, would not.

> completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff

a) Just because humanity as a whole did hard things, doesn't mean that most humans did or were willing to. It's perfectly possible that all the hard things we did were accomplished by a handful of remarkable individuals, doing things that the majority never would have been willing to.

b) just because people in one age have been willing to do things, doesn't mean they are willing to do so in all ages. So it's not like the past necessarily proves anything here.

> you'd be utterly insane, as an individual developer without a full-time security team, to expose a self-hosted application to the Internet.

You don't have to. The article mentions Tailscale--the whole point of which is to not have any Internet-facing app exposed. Everything is done peer to peer between clients that are behind firewalls. There's nothing listening on an Internet exposed socket for random connections to come in.

Apparently I'm utterly insane for years with no consequences.

SaaS/cloud providers propagate this FUD 24/7 and then Okta, which should be pinnacle of security gets hacked and has issues with disclosure.

Relax. Most companies has security team incapable of operating beyond checklist.