Why setup your personal Linux VPS
This article is first from a small series about owning your personal VPS. It is about reasons why you should or should not host services by yourself on personal VPS.
Articles of this series
2021-08-04 Howto setup your personal XMPP server
2021-07-01 Howto setup your personal CalDAV/CardDAV server
2021-02-12 Howto proxy your self-hosted services using web server
2021-01-08 Howto setup and secure web server
2020-12-30 Services you can selfhost on you personal Linux VPS
2020-09-22 Howto secure your personal Linux VPS
2020-08-21 Howto setup your personal Linux VPS
2020-07-20 Why setup your personal Linux VPS
Knowledge
Setting up an operating system with self hosted services require some knowledge. Debugging problems or optimizing configurations too. If you are interested in Linux, OS in general, networking, firewalls, services, security... then the best way how to learn it is to work with it. Your personal server / play ground is great choice for practical learning.
Privacy
If you care about privacy of your personal data, then you will have full control if services you use will be self hosted by you, on your machine. You don't need to care about licenses, terms of service, or cyber attacks targetting online services with millions of users. There is much smaller chance of being hacked because of data when you selfhost your services. The reason is, no one cares. It is more efficient to attack services with huge amount of users. Personal data of one individual has no value unless someone is interested directly in you.
Control
You are having full control over you data and also over services you host. You can replace it or make any changes you want. Since you have control over filesystem and databases, there is also higher chance that you can backup, convert, or migrate data between services that have no export/import compatibility.
Fun
If tinkering with stuff mentioned above is not going to be fun for you, then you should probably not go for it, unless you have senior knowledge and you just need to get things done for some reason. If this is your first attempt to walk this rocky path, then you should be entusiastic about it, otherwise you probably won't finish it or revert to your current easy digital life after some time.
Time
Taking care of VPS takes time. Especially in the beginning, during learning, setup and configuration phase. If you are interested in it, you will probably optimize and modify stuff on the road as you find out about better or more interesting way of doing things. If you don't have time, better try it later when you'll have some.
Stability
Most of the mainstream services are rock stable. Backed by redundancy, clustering, automatic crash recovery, backups and 24/7 care by system admins. If you don't have the experience and knowledge, it will take time to finetune things to be stable. You need to count with that. But don't worry. After that, you are able to get stable enough for daily use without much problems.
Summary
After reading information above, if you are still interested in setting up your own personal VPS. Continue to my [next article](https://mizik.eu/blog/how-to-setup-your-personal-linux-vps/)