Benefits and drawbacks of self-hosting

Last updated: July 3rd, 2025

As someone who has run many services for a while now, I feel I can speak to the advantages and disadvantages of self-hosting. In my case, the benefits have more than made up for the drawbacks. However, each person or organization must decide whether self-hosting is worth it for themselves.

Table of contents

• Benefits
• Drawbacks

Benefits

• Learning more about system administration and software stacks by building it yourself. Few teachers beat hands-on experience. When I first started, I didn’t even know what an A record was (a Domain Name System, or DNS, record that maps a domain to an IP address). Now I know much more about networking and cybersecurity.
• Control and choice. For instance, you can decide what operating system to use. Often multiple software choices exist for particular use cases (web servers immediately come to mind), and you control all the configuration details.
• Transparency. Software that can be self-hosted typically uses open source code. Because you assembled the pieces, how everything fits together becomes more apparent. That means when something goes wrong, you have some idea of where to start looking.
• Repairability. When something breaks, you can fix it yourself without waiting for someone else to get to it.
• Privacy. This relates to the other points—because you have control and transparency, you can know how the system processes sensitive data and what parties gain access to it.

Drawbacks

• Time investment. Learning the necessary skills and setting everything up initially takes patience, and the time investment doesn’t end there. Regular system maintenance is part of managing your own server. This involves making sure everything still functions correctly and performing upgrades, among other tasks.
• Full responsibility. You bear responsibility for everything that happens on your server. If it breaks, no one else will fix it. Sometimes this creates real inconvenience because things tend to break at inopportune times. This is the tradeoff for having more power and control.
• Ongoing costs. Self-hosting typically costs money. Recurring costs for a virtual private server and domain name can add up over time. But these may cost less than what you would otherwise pay for cloud computing, so context matters here.
• Security risk. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can create vulnerabilities without even realizing it. This is why taking your time and acquiring the knowledge needed to do things right matters. Starting small also helps (for example, hosting a static website to start carries little risk).