What's the biggest reason you self-host?

Cost, and control.

I want to own my stuff. And I want direct control over it. I want it to do exactly what I want, when I want, how I want. I'm sick of paying monthly rental charges, and I'm sick of companies making changes to services that negatively impact my experience.

My hardware, my software, my rules. Simple as that really.

Privacy, it is almost impossible in the modern era. But still a bit more under control

Security, it is an illusion, very hard to keep on security

Cost, the hardware, time invested and energy may be higher than standard services

Education, good reason

Because it is cool, yeah it is

Better services, disagree, they are not better, usually clumsy and high maintenance, may work as intended or lack features

There is a simpler reason I like self hosting, I don't want to be subject to the mercy of the changing of rules of a tool I can't manage. Possible closure, increasing cost, features by tiers, I really hate subscription models.

Independence. I'm done with relying on external service providers. They can't be trusted. There is an inherent conflict of interests between commercial service providers and their users. It's not in their best interest to provide the best service possible, it's in their interest to provide a service that is barely better than the competition (if there even is any competition). That's the reason why commercial services are never great and always just "meh". I don't want to rely on parties whose interests are against mine. Because sooner or later they will turn into shit.

I started out self hosting everything... 20 years ago or so. Then I got swept up in the "cloud" movement and put so many things into the "cloud".
Today I'm reverting back to how I started, self hosting everything that I can.

Mainly privacy, but also because they keep changing and I don't want to have to worry about them.
I just didn't feel like it was 'my' data anymore.

Because hosting commercially with large (multi-TB) storage gets very expensive very quickly

D. All of the above. Mainly to learn but I wouldn't put my self hosted services anywhere else.

Privacy and control are the main reasons why I host some of my data myself. This choice is closely linked to my values, as I'm not comfortable with the idea of entrusting my data to large companies whose only motivation is to make more money over customer satisfaction. I prefer to keep my autonomy.
However, simplicity is the main reason why I choose not to self-host certain elements. For example, I'm not yet ready to manage the self-hosting of my e-mails.

Many years ago I finally got fed up with having my favorite tools for productivity becoming obsolete or just disappearing. It was at that point that I decided to base my entire workflow on simple text files. The development of clouds made it much easier to adopt lots of self-hosted tools that could be based on text files, such as some apps in Nextcloud.

Stuff can disappear or stop being free at any time for no reason, with no notice.

Education, sometimes better service, mostly because I just have fun with and regarding video streaming because I'm not willing to pay for every service existing.

I'm going to say sort of all of the above, but not just across the whole board. Some services I host because I want a better service than is available elsewhere.

For example I host AdGuard Home and OPNsense because it's better than my ISP supplied router and I get more out of it so that's better service. I host Immich because I don't want to pay Google to store all my photos when I have a server sat here that's quite capable of doing it so that's cost I guess.

Privacy, Education, Being Cool. Also, there are some services that are not available commercially.

Cost and privacy. Currently selfhosting adguardhome. Something like nextdns or controld cost like $35-40/year. Mine cost nothing monetarily since its hosted on oracle cloud free tier. Only costed me like an hour or two of my time to set it up. Plus i don't trust them enough to not sell my browsing habit.

Can I do all of the above?

Cost is kind of in the grey zone for data/media hoarders. Like, I bought two 16tb HDDs and that cost me a pretty penny. I could have used that same amount of money for streaming services (or whatever) and relieve myself of the pain of tinkering. Partially, it's about saying fuck you to the giant corpos in my own little way, and a little bit is about just knowing how to get what I need without paying for them which feels neat. Sometimes I feel a little guilty doing this but most media are shit anyway, and I buy the things I really like so that's that.

all of the above + more???

There's no option for "all of the above" and also no option for "I just want to see the results".

Sheesh could have made it top 2 or 3. Talk about tough

I started for education, around 20 years ago. Then, the "main" reason shifted to cost for a short period, and is now privacy (albeit education and cost still being in line :-))

Cool and better - It's cool when you got something working in your house and it's better when it's in your hands, rather than companies which declare limitless free storage for photos and videos, and then after some time and tens of gigabytes they decide to stop uploading more data, limit max size for file and charge you to pay for this service.
Nah, I'll rather just buy this cool mini PC, components and storage for it once and will not pay infinitely for that sometimes changing crap service.

What about "it's a fun hobby" or "for learning purposes"?

For me it's both Privacy, control and education.

The cloud is just someone else's computer.

i've got extra gear so why not put to good use?

I like control and i like to do cool things. There is a reason I never let a friend manage or host an event to an unhealthy point of being stubborn.

I love my Lychee server, I love my Bitwarden server and I love my Minecraft server. Allows me to simply share it and have no issue or worry of it being looked at.

When you use the service hosted by someone else there is a compromise on lot of features that you can have for free. Though the luxury of having privacy, security and learning while you dosel host cannot be discounted and above all free.

A mix of cost (questionable), education (less questionable) and coolness (not questionable)

Mainly started off with using Plex since shows that I wanted to watch were simply not available on any service available to me. Now it gets used when the service where the content would be available craps itself.

Otherwise I use it to host a nightscout service for my diabetes management since the CGM manufacturer dropped support for an old phone I kept around for no other reason than to use the CGM since the new phone I had was never supported to begin with. Granted now the manufacturer came out with a standalone receiver, but why bother when I can just use my regular phone now?

Cost. But I do not agree with 'Whi would i pay for a service when i could host it myself for free?'

It is not 'free' it is cheaper. Today I got a quote from utilities company saying that api access to how much heat I use is 20 EUR/month a software defined radio recover is 20-40 USD + shipping. To do a full setup and research it takes about half of day some exiting HW and electricity but even summing all of that up. It is cheaper and utils company has already lied to me at least twice this year, so... their stacking motivation for me to independetly monitor the metering.

mostly for fun, cuz i guess for some reason i enjoy having problems, but that leads to it also being for education. i’ve learned a lot maintaining these systems. and it’s just cool, i like being able to say i can and try out different software to see what works. i like the custom approach rather than a one size fits all society

I do it because "all of the above".

I have not bothered to rank my many reasons. Why would I?

It can be all those reasons.

For me it's all the reasons but it started of as an educational thing for my job.

Cost? when you look at price of equipment plus increase in power consumption, is it really cheaper?

Freedom !!

variety of content. who wants to pay for five plus services because there's not one that has everything you want to watch/read/listen to

I started self-hosting a few years ago for privacy reasons. Now I do it for a mix of reasons. I got my current job because I was one of the only applicants who had experience using Linux outside of a classroom. Last weekend I spent a day learning how podman play kube worked because it was fun and because it'll be useful to know for a new app we're deploying at work.

...it's certainly not cost though. This shit gets expensive.

I would have voted "because it's cool" but really it's because I have control of my software and my equipment. Education is part of the deal. Security and privacy is not guaranteed but it's under my control.

Definitely missing out on "better services" because large data models can do very good spam filtering which I don't get because I don't have access to other peoples' mail ... (which falls into privacy concerns... of other people...)

I voted for one but I would say all are valid and as important

You forgot the most important one: Piracy (Oops!)

Y****arr!!

Voted privacy - but more importantly (and not listed) "My services wont disappear with little or no notice"

All of the above. + Archival

OP, your poll needs an "All of the above" option. That would be my choice.

For me it's a combination of cost, education, and cool factor