Self-hosting (web services)

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Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of someone's own control. Self-hosting allows users to have more control over their data, privacy, and computing infrastructure, as well as potentially saving costs and improving skills. [1] [2]

Contents

History

The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines. The first public cloud service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), was launched in 2006, offering Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as its initial products. [3]

Self-hosting web services became more popular with the rise of free software and open source software projects that provide alternatives to various web-based services and applications, such as file storage, password management, media streaming, home automation, and more. There is also a sizeable hobbyist community around self-hosting, made up of hobbyists, technology professionals and privacy conscious individuals. [2] [4]

Benefits

Some of the benefits of self-hosting are:

Challenges

Some of the challenges of self-hosting are: [1] [5]

Examples

There are many examples of self-hosted services and applications that can replace or complement web-based ones, such as:[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

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Trusted Computing (TC) is a technology developed and promoted by the Trusted Computing Group. The term is taken from the field of trusted systems and has a specialized meaning that is distinct from the field of confidential computing. With Trusted Computing, the computer will consistently behave in expected ways, and those behaviors will be enforced by computer hardware and software. Enforcing this behavior is achieved by loading the hardware with a unique encryption key that is inaccessible to the rest of the system and the owner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web hosting service</span> Service for hosting websites

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Web Services</span> On-demand cloud computing company

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A file-hosting service, also known as cloud-storage service, online file-storage provider, or cyberlocker, is an internet hosting service specifically designed to host user files. These services allow users to upload files that can be accessed over the internet after providing a username and password or other authentication. Typically, file hosting services allow HTTP access, and in some cases, FTP access. Other related services include content-displaying hosting services, virtual storage, and remote backup solutions.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud</span> Cloud computing platform

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Cloud computing is used by most people every day but there are issues that limit its widespread adoption. It is one of the fast developing area that can instantly supply extensible services by using internet with the help of hardware and software virtualization. Cloud computing biggest advantage is flexible lease and release of resources as per the requirement of the user. Its other advantages include efficiency, compensating the costs in operations and management. It curtails down the high prices of hardware and software

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Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers. However, developers of serverless applications are not concerned with capacity planning, configuration, management, maintenance, fault tolerance, or scaling of containers, VMs, or physical servers. Serverless computing does not hold resources in volatile memory; computing is rather done in short bursts with the results persisted to storage. When an app is not in use, there are no computing resources allocated to the app. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application. It can be a form of utility computing.

References

  1. 1 2 Fitzpatrick, Jason (2022-11-21). "Here's Why Self-Hosting a Server Is Worth the Effort". How-To Geek. Retrieved 2022-01-14.
  2. 1 2 Devine, Richard (2021-12-28). "How I fell into the self-hosting rabbit hole in 2021". Windows Central. Retrieved 2022-01-14.
  3. "A Brief History of AWS". The Media Temple Blog. Retrieved 2022-01-14.
  4. "Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time". Vice. Retrieved 2022-01-14.
  5. "What is Self-hosting?". Computer Hope. Retrieved 2022-01-14.