I don’t know if renting a dedicated server goes against the point of selfhosting but whatever.
Everyone seems to recommend hetzner on reddit because they are cheaper, but OVH seems to be much cheaper that hetzner for low end servers, especially the Kimsufi and So You Start ranges.
This is the server I was looking at with OVH:
CPU : Intel Xeon D1520 - 4c/8t - 2.2 GHz/2.6 GHz
Memory : 32 GB DDR4 ECC
Storage : 4 x 2 TB HDD SATA Soft RAID
Public bandwidth : 250 Mbps
Price: £26.66 per month.
hetzner seems to start a lot higher with specs, but I don’t need 64GB of ram and a 1Gb/s internet connection, The instance I am posting this from is the lowest spec kimsufi possible with an intel atom and 4GB of RAM and that is running lemmy and mastodon fine.
Is there something else bad about OVH that I am missing? (other than the flammable servers)
Pure self hosting is having a server in your premises. But you can still rent one and still have plenty of control over your computing.
I host some stuff at home but my internet is a bit slow, Also frequent power outages.
Better than a reddit account though
I’m usually happy with the trade-off for better reliability and speed if it’s not anything where I want absolute privacy or control.
The privacy is going to be somewhat okay because you’re paying them for it, it’s supposed to be your machine and analysing all of the different content and traffic people host is much more difficult versus when a company provides one app. Plus it would be a PR and legal disaster. They’re probably not going to be passing on how I use my server to advertisers… probably, I hope.
So yeah, the only way I can be certain is to purely run it in my home.