I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees.
To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed.
I can also very simply assign a domain to it and am pretty sure that software like nextcloud offers oauth access so my friends would NOT be required to sign up for my "weird app". Well, technically they do but oauth automates it.
Am I missing something?
What you’re doing with Hetzner is just a few less layers of abstraction compared to AWS or Azure. They can still theoretically take down the machine or steal your data, if they wanted to.
I don’t know what the correct definition of self hosted is, but there is a big ideological difference between what you’re doing and self-hosting actual, physical hardware in your home.
In fact, I’d argue the physical risk of loss, theft, or data compromise is much higher at home than in a professional datacenter with power redundancy, security controls, and constant uptime monitoring.
It’s a bit like saying, "Don’t trust the bank, they could take your money and freeze your account — keep all your money under the mattress." Technically possible, yes. But come on.