Hey There,
Self-Hosting is the act of running your own online services from wherever you live. Many times systems administrators will pick up old equipment from their work, configure it at home, and run their own email server or website. They use open source software most of the time, as licenses for enterprise grade hosting software is expensive.
The best place to find applications to use for self-hosting is the Github repo Awesome Self-hosted. We use this repo to find most of our applications.
With the advent of Docker, it is much easier to deploy applications from many different vendors or creators onto self-hosted architecture. With that container layer, you are able to achieve a common configuration layer for your entire setup. You pull your images from DockerHub straight into your system, then you need to figure out how to get it from outside your home or office inside. This involves a router or firewall, and can involve a reverse proxy depending on what you want to achieve.
I will say there are difficulties with this, which is why we are building out the way we are at Altha Technology. We are at heart IT geeks who genuinely enjoy computers and think they are cool. We also believe in Open Source technologies. We have recently come up with some solid configuration methods to allow someone to run a business in a way that makes sense, with a data-forward mindset allowing customers to own their own data, migrate that data easily, and be fast enough for production workloads.
Hire Us for a consultation on your self-hosting endeavors.
Sincerely,
Jared
Owner, Altha Technology