[NateEag]

You make a good point clearly. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

I guess I feel like the maintenance cost is worth the knowledge I gain from automating my own infrastructure, but I realize not everyone is interested in devops. I'll also note it costs me very little time - I don't remember the last time I had to do anything actively with it.

Elsewhere in the thread I mentioned vendor lockin, which does concern me. I also worry about vendor monoculture - if everyone just uses AWS, they gain undue influence over the market, so in some ways I guess my stubborn self-hosting is a small gesture against that.

I see a lot of people complain about how the internet has become a drab, uniform machine that treats people as eyeballs or wallets to be sacrificed to Moloch [1], little like the wild, free-spirited collection of small sites it was back in the late 90s.

I think a lot of that is the price paid for centralization and funding, so again, self-hosting is a small way to fight back just a bit against that.

1: Moloch in this sense: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/