Not having to worry about all the horrors one is subjected to when they depend on a free service for online presence, email, etc. is worth a great deal to me. Any free service can disappear or kick you off at a whim leaving you with nothing, social media sites and apps come and go (and/or enshittify) while as a consumer of a paid service you not only have a quality of service beyond freebies (privacy, no ads, what I want to put online is exactly what goes online unadulterated, people who want to find or contact me can always do so at my own site on my own terms) you also have consumer protections if things go wrong.
While I’m not self-hosting my web stuff on my own hardware, the host I use is a small business owned by an old friend and fellow hacker which means I’m not at the mercy of some faceless corporation’s TOS either. My host and I see eye-to-eye on what’s appropriate for me to put out there via her machinery, and she’s also not extrajudicially sharing my private crap with fascist government forces like the big tech monoliths and most free services do.
I won’t say where I rent my servers from so as not to “shill”, but yeah. Good little company run by one old guy, I think. Maybe he has some help, but seems like the rare times I’ve had to contact, it’s probably just him. Totally self-managed, but the prices reflect that and I’ve got a couple of really decent dedicated servers for $25 and $35 per month. Webmin on top and it’s so much better and cheaper than a decade or more ago I was paying $200/mo for equivalent level.
My domain names and web/email server hosting.
Not having to worry about all the horrors one is subjected to when they depend on a free service for online presence, email, etc. is worth a great deal to me. Any free service can disappear or kick you off at a whim leaving you with nothing, social media sites and apps come and go (and/or enshittify) while as a consumer of a paid service you not only have a quality of service beyond freebies (privacy, no ads, what I want to put online is exactly what goes online unadulterated, people who want to find or contact me can always do so at my own site on my own terms) you also have consumer protections if things go wrong.
While I’m not self-hosting my web stuff on my own hardware, the host I use is a small business owned by an old friend and fellow hacker which means I’m not at the mercy of some faceless corporation’s TOS either. My host and I see eye-to-eye on what’s appropriate for me to put out there via her machinery, and she’s also not extrajudicially sharing my private crap with fascist government forces like the big tech monoliths and most free services do.
I won’t say where I rent my servers from so as not to “shill”, but yeah. Good little company run by one old guy, I think. Maybe he has some help, but seems like the rare times I’ve had to contact, it’s probably just him. Totally self-managed, but the prices reflect that and I’ve got a couple of really decent dedicated servers for $25 and $35 per month. Webmin on top and it’s so much better and cheaper than a decade or more ago I was paying $200/mo for equivalent level.