self-hosted
also: on-premises, on-prem
Running and maintaining software on your own hardware or servers rather than relying on third-party cloud providers or SaaS services.
Self-hosted means you own the responsibility for deploying, configuring, securing, and maintaining an application on infrastructure you control. Instead of paying a company to host a service, you run it yourself—whether on a home server, VPS, or data center.
Common self-hosted applications include Nextcloud (personal cloud storage), Gitea (code repository), Jellyfin (media server), and Pi-hole (DNS sinkhole). For example, rather than paying for Dropbox, you could self-host Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi to store files privately on hardware in your own home.
The tradeoff is clear: you gain privacy, control, and avoid vendor lock-in, but you must handle backups, security updates, troubleshooting, and uptime yourself. Self-hosting is popular in the Linux community for privacy-conscious users and sysadmins.