Why I chose to build self-hosted when everyone told me to just use SaaS
I spent 20 years working on critical systems for air traffic control. UNIX, Linux, bare metal. Nothing ran on someone else's server, since many lives depended on it.
Then I came home and looked at my own setup. Gmail. Google Drive. Dropbox. Notion. Every file, every conversation, every document -- on infrastructure I had zero control over.
It felt like building a house and realizing the foundation belongs to someone else.
The moment I stopped ignoring it, it was around 2010. I created a Facebook account. Just to see. Immediately hated how it was designed to waste my time. When I tried to delete it, I couldn't. That was it. My dad died defending his liberty of speech. Not being able to delete my own account felt like a small version of the same thing.
So I started building. Not because self-hosting is fashionable -- it wasn't then. But because owning your own infrastructure is the only thing that makes sense if you take control seriously.
Three years of building later, I'm still asking the same question: why do smart engineers who would never run critical infra on untrusted servers accept this for their own data?
Anyone here made the switch to fully self-hosted? What was the tipping point for you?