Disclaimer: I’m no expert on this.

I realized recently there are two common types of Self Hosters here.

  1. I work in IT and host some services for my employer so we don’t have to rely on the big tech companies, for economic or other reasons.

  2. I self host some services at home or on a VPS, as a hobby or for other reasons, but nobody pays me to do that.

The answers people provide seem to vary greatly based on whether the commenter is in the #1 or #2 camp. I myself have gotten answers along the lines of, “why aren’t you acting more like a paid IT person?” and it’s a little off-putting.

How to resolve this? Could we refer to one group or the other differently?

Maybe I’m making a bigger deal out of this than is warranted and I’m the only one confused?

If nothing else, I will call out my hobby status from now on when posting/commenting here.

Edited to add: TIL. I’ll use these terms carefully in the future. Thanks!

  • ITGuyLevi@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    Mine is definitely a hobby… possibly a borderline addiction. I am an IT person by day and then selfhost a bit at home. Most of my equipment is good old eBay specials (R720xd, R610), or just accumulated over the years (a few HP Microservers, RAID enclosures, etc).

    The uptime is decent but my ISP isn’t great, plus one of the servers has been having issues so until I find a few hours to focus on it, it is not something I would consider “acting like a paid IT”.

    Not to make myself sound like a bad IT person, but my homelab is held together with hope and scripts to recover when it goes down. One day I’ll cluster some lower power proxmox systems with portainer and ensure everything important has a way to fail over and backed up offsite (no, I’ll probably just take a nap if I get a free afternoon lol).

    Sometimes people in these communities don’t realize how they come off, tone is hard over text, and I’m just as bad in person (thankfully I work remote most days).