Posted by rociiu 11 hours ago
If the software can be switched to a rented or purchased hardware (I do not want Cloudflare's offering) then it is "self-host-able" IMO.
I think there are open source Cloudflare alternative hosting software.
The first sentence states:
"Self-hosting is the practice of running a website or service on a home server instead of a web hosting service outside of the administrator's own control."
And then basically contradicts itself in the next paragraph:
"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."
In any case, I think the generally accepted definition of self-hosting has expanded over the years to include software that you're running on rented hardware in someone else's data center.
Yes it's not the same as hosting as your own hardware but I would argue that it accomplishes the same goals. The goal is to get other people out of your data. With a "service" the underlying company has every incentive to look at your data and use that to improve it's service, but when you host something yourself with a provider, it's in that providers best interest to never look at your data.
For me it all comes down to the goals of the people your are doing business with. With Cloudflare at least, their goal is to just upsell me on hosting equipment, they couldn't give a rats ass what I'm hosting on that hardware so long it's not illegal.
You can self-host on-prem or in the cloud.
If someone else can fat finger a delete, it’s not self hosted.
Whether you use the cloud, or a vps, or a dedicated bare metal server, or your own equipment at home is all self hosting.
I would describe it as externally hosted yet managed specifically because someone else is most likely, whether they admit to it or not, recording some sort of logs on my service and data and that is a choice that I do not own or, in some cases, have access to.
I hope AI will push infra, including good-enough AI itself, dirt cheap, so that everyone has "good enough" software for themselves. Tailscale is a game changer in this regard but only the first step.
(You can manage it, the resources, replace the software, etc.)
It scales for the intended audience.
Self hosting doesn't mean you need to build the next AWS.
It’s a weird complaint for people who supposedly like hacker culture.
It’s self hosted as in not by an ai provider. This is obvious.
Sure it’s set up to run on some infrastructure but just tweak it if you want to and stop complaining.
Why add a false feature claim if the true features are cool enough?
Are we now adding all possible features to the description just because they can be added by hand or LLM?
And since when is hacker culture about false advertising
They're pretty cool indeed, just pretty risky.
With `@cf/qwen/qwen3.8-27b` it's 240K input tokens and 34,000 output tokens
As is, I have already been running my own service (with no intent to open source) for years where I decide features, tools and UX that suits me. My UX is substantially different from these chat boxes. It is also multi-user by design. It still needs time investment but the tradeoff is worth for me. Over time, I expect this threshold to keep getting lower and increasing percentage of folks to cross it.
Generally, as that happens with the cost and time to build software trending lower, I think it will be interesting to watch how this dynamic evolves. For example, is it possible "personal OS" systems could emerge that solve the users' needs? I have created many smallish solutions for my needs recently, but they aren't unified in any way and I personally don't have a desire to be that [human] OS.
Sometimes these "open source" services are a bit misleading as there is a coupling to the org providing them; I think the OP here just means there's nothing extra needed beyond whatever cloudflare commitment you already have.
