Why Self-Hosting?

Now that I have relaunched lifeonbtc as Living Sovereign by Chris Almida, I want to expand upon the why behind self-hosting from my perspective and how it relates to Living Sovereign.

Let's start with defining self-hosting.

Self-hosting is the process of running and managing your own services—such as websites, email, cloud storage, and media servers—on hardware that you control, rather than relying on third-party cloud providers.

You can see where this is applicable to living sovereign with the key element being that the infrastructure and hardware is under your control. This can span a VERY wide spectrum from a tiny raspberry-pi dedicated to blocking ads being targeted to computers on your home network to a full-fledged home server build or even a home server lab with multiple services running like media servers, music servers, home automation, solar controllers, and personal blogs like this one running on a self-hosted instance of Ghost and even more recently hosting your own AI instance.

The fact of the matter is that all the free services we so commonly use as offered by big tech, are NOT free. You see you and your data are the product and they protect their product by keeping your data as closely held as they can. Even when you pay for a service you are giving the provider data that they monetize - what you look at, buy, share, promote, etc. All that data has value, and the value is being extracted often without your permission and almost always without any sort of compensation.

In some cases, this tradeoff might be acceptable to you and in others it may not. What most people don't realize is that there are other choices available and a lot of them are built on FOSS.

FOSS stands for Free and Open-Source Software. It refers to software that is both free to use and has its source code openly available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. The goal of FOSS is to promote transparency, collaboration, and community-driven development.

Let's look at the blog example. A LOT of people use a cloud-based blogging service provider like WordPress, SubStack, Blogger, Medium and yes Ghost.

Wait a minute didn't you say you were self-hosting Ghost? Yes I am. Ghost is built as a FOSS project run by a non-profit that offers a paid cloud based managed service called Ghost Pro in addition to the free open-source version that you can host yourself! They have a pretty EPIC business model and you should take a minute to go check them out - https://ghost.org/about/

As for me - I chose to self -host which requires my resources, time and attention and means that if something breaks - I am the person who has to figure it out. The bonus is all my data belongs to me - AND in the future, should I provide enough value, I can create a member only section that is under my control and NOT subject to any content restrictions from hosting providers, payment processors or anyone else. This is living sovereign.

I would be remiss if I didn't note that I am a technical geek, have worked on multiple software projects including Microsoft SBS, Home Server and Azure IAS and led a previous life as a Network Administrator. In short, I love this stuff - I dream about docker files and hardware upgrades and administration improvements etc.

Don't worry though - you don't have to be a super geek to self-host, you just have to have a need that a FOSS project or even a commercial self-hosted project (like UnRaid) can itch and the desire to put it in place. Most projects have excellent documentation, good open and embracing support communities and of course there is always ChatGTP, or Grok or Claude to help you through with any stickybits.....

That reminds me of where I will be investing my time here shortly - self-hosted opensource AI projects. While it sounds trite and is often super overhyped, AI is going to change all of our lives dramatically. Living sovereign does NOT mean living in a bubble and you certainly will be ahead of the curve if you reach to understand where technology is going and how YOU can best apply it to your needs. Otherwise, someone else will decide for you and you can be assured that they will act form their own interest first no matter how altruistic they may claim to be.

For those who are interested on the technical side of things, I am going to be launching a GitHub repository with all of my docker compose files and instructions. Hopefully, you can use these as templates to get your self-hosted services up and running with less learning curve than I had.

Chris Almida

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