Benefits and drawbacks of self-hosting

Last updated: July 7th, 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. Still, each person or organization must decide for themselves whether the pros outweigh the cons.

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 the term “A record” meant (for those who don’t already know, an A record refers to a Domain Name System (DNS) record that maps a domain to an Internet Protocol (IP) address).
• Control and choice. For instance, you can decide what operating system to use. Often many software choices exist for a particular use case, and you can control the configuration details.
• Transparency. Self-hostable software typically uses open source code. Because you assembled the pieces, you can more readily understand how everything fits together. 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 can gain access to it.

Drawbacks

• Time investment. Learning the necessary skills and setting everything up takes patience, and the time investment doesn’t end there. Managing your own server requires regular system maintenance. 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. Not only can you fix it yourself, you must fix it yourself. Sometimes this creates real inconvenience because things often break at inopportune times.
• 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. 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 carries little risk.