Why I host myself (hope my ISP doesn't read this!)

As a few of you may now, this blog is hosted on an old Shuttle mini-PC I have sitting in my basement. A few of you have asked me why I decided to host this blog myself on my own gear when there are so many free blog publsihers out there. Even if I couldn’t live with the advetising that the free services would put along side my content, I could always pay someone to host the site for a fairy nominal fee. Well this post is an attempt to explain why I host my own blog on my own equipment. I will try to add a few posts later about how i actually do it. But now to the reasons:

1. I’m cheap: Although it’s true I could use a free blogging service, I think the advertising is distracting. The pay for host options out there are pretty cheap as well, but still not close to what I pay, which amounts to $15 per year to buy my domain. That’s it. I’m already paying for high speed access at home, so I consider that a sunk cost. I already had the machine lying about and the rest of the software I use, including the dynamic domain service software, is free / open source.
2. I like to control my own data: I have read to many stories about people using free and/or ad-supported services that run out of money and decide to shut down.  The other big factor here is rights to the information.  I’m not kidding myself into thinking that anything here is really valuable, but I do want to maintain the rights.  Using other services requires me to give up some of those rights.  While it’s true that I run the risk of losing everything if there is a fire or my machine dies, that’s an acceptable risk to me.  Taking the time to read and understand the EULAs of all the free services I would use everytime they change is not.
3. I like to learn how this all works: I am a geek after all and somehow knowing how all this works, from the OS level up to the browser.  Knowing how it all works is fun and it lets me play around a lot more.
4. I like the speed having it all local for “big” jobs: I am doing a lot more with audio and video and being able to copy it over local gigabit ethernet it a lot better than me depending on my broadband connection for that.  Now, I know that is has to get out of that connection at some point, but mostly that’s you problem, not mine 😉