The article is right about the money and misses what people are actually buying. Nobody self-hosts photos to save money. They do it to stop renting access to their own files.
The honest accounting has three columns: cloud costs money forever, self-hosting costs time forever, and both are fine trades when you know you are making them.
The option that rarely comes up in these debates is the boring middle: local-first apps on hardware you already own. No monthly fee, no server to patch, files in plain folders you control.
That covers organising, searching and keeping the archive yours. It does not cover off-site copies or phone auto-upload, so most people still pair it with one dumb storage target. Disclosure: I build a paid Mac app in that local-first category, which is why I notice the gap. For beginners my advice is to start local-first and add a server only when a concrete need forces it. That way nobody ends up as the person who quit self-hosting.
Who ever said this was about money?!
This is true, self hosting doesn’t save you money. It is, in fact, more expensive and costs your time.
This is because modern technology isn’t sold to you as a product, it’s sold to you as a loss leader so that you use their products and let them spy on you so that they can sell that data to advertisers or anybody who can complete an ACH transfer.
Your options are
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Use commercial services and sell your privacy in exchange for cheap consumer electronics which will be obsolete next year either by design or through engineered hardware failure.
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Setup the services on your own devices and pay the cost in hardware and free time.
In one scenario you spend a bit more money, in the other scenario you don’t have privacy. Everyone gets to choose which is more important.
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So where can I put 130TB of files for less than $10/TB (what I paid for my HDDs) plus about 50¢ per day in electricity?
On backblaze I’d be spending $910… PER MONTH and I wouldn’t even have unlimited access to my files.
This has to be rage bait.
I don’t think beginners are going to be in that situation and most people probably won’t ever be in your situation, mostly people doing it as a hobby are going to end up with 100+ TB of data.
EDIT: when I say “most people wouldn’t be in that situation” I was thinking of the typical person who is on the fence about this and would be swayed by the “it will save you money” argument. Its quite likely that most people currently self hosting (I’d imagine mostly hobbyists) could be in a similar situation to you if they aren’t already
Beginners can recycle an old mini/micro PC. You can buy refurbished ones from computer recyclers for like $15.
At both ends of the spectrum you can save money. The people who don’t (like me) are not doing it for the goal of saving money.
Fine. Don’t do it to save money. Do it because we are sick and tired of outsourcing everything to a damn subscription and owning and controlling nothing in our lives anymore.
Exactly — money is not the only cost nor benefit. It’s fun, it gives me control, it’s not going to get acquired and trashed, etc.
Sounds like something a hosting service would say.
Self-hosting will not give your mouth sex appeal
Self-hosting will not get rid of the nubs
Self-hosting will not make you look five pounds thinner
That last one … Spend all your money on hardware and you won’t be able to afford food. You may lose weight…
Fair point. Especially at the current HW prices, you can starve pretty quickly.
Maybe I should have paraphrased “Whitey’s on the moon” instead. “Data centres on the moon”?
Yeah…um…no? I run a dozen different services on a $200 mini pc without issue.
My Server idles at 80w 😭 But at least I’m in control and it’s so fun and interesting
