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3 months ago
2
For the past decade or so, our corporate infrastructure here in Europe has been beholden to a few prominent tech companies – mainly based in the United States of America. Namely – Microsoft, Google and Amazon (For Amazon Web Services, if you were wondering!) However, I think it is safe to say that our once reliable friend ‘across the pond’ has become a little bit less reliable and more volatile as of late. If Amazon, Microsoft and/or Google suddenly were to bolster up a pricing plan or cut off services all of a sudden, chaos will ensue. The nature of the internet was designed to be open and decentralised- so why have we sleepwalked into 30% of our internet being operated by Amazon, 21% being operated by Microsoft and 12% operated by Google? And when it comes to corporate infrastructure, Microsoft Teams, Outlook and G-Suite are the most commonly used for office infrastructure. Shifting over web-hosting to more domestic markets would be a bit more straight forward, but our reliance on closed-source rented software is an issue. Not just for economic reasons and that of monopoly, but also an issue of national security.
In my own personal life, I have gradually been moving from corporate software to self-hosted when I get the time to do so. Some have proved trickier than others – such as Email. I still cannot reliably send email without it being marked as spam. I have been looking into an SMTP relay, but still haven’t gotten it set up yet. Even though that would rely on a third-party, it would still give me more independence.
A big one for me was Immich – Google Photos shut down it’s free plan a while ago, and I realised it was more economical for me to buy a 2 terabyte hard drive and to run Immich on it instead of buying the endless amount of upgrades that Google would require me to purchase, charged annually. If I needed more space, I could make a one-off purchase of a hard drive, and nobody could control my account except from me. I could also use that space to host other things I would like.
I also set up an XMPP service for fun as well. All of this is also handy if I were to choose to travel to a location where access to services such as Google are restricted- I am still able to keep friends and family updated over XMPP, back up my photos and videos as normal, and anything I want to post can be posted here.
There is no harm in investing in self hosted services with open source software. It would also create a lot more domestic jobs for people to manage and maintain such services if the industry were to shift in this direction!
