Self-hosted or service? A practical decision framework
A comparison based on dependency, privacy, reachability, recovery and the real cost of attention.
Control is not the only axis
Self-hosting can improve privacy and portability, but it also makes availability, updates and recovery your problem. That trade can be excellent when the service is local, replaceable or personally interesting.
Public, critical or rarely touched services often benefit from a smaller external operational surface. The right answer is a portfolio, not a rule.
Score the consequences
Ask who notices an outage, whether data can be reconstructed, how access works away from home and how quickly a replacement could be brought online.
Then account for attention. A free service that demands weekly care is not free; a paid service that blocks export is not low risk.