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Comment by joaodlf | Hacker News Reader

This can be applied not just to writing... Making videos? Host them, why let Youtube monetise you? Steaming your video game playing? Host the streams, why let Twitch monetise you?

People use these services for 2 reasons:

* Ease of use (and typically free, unlike Ghost - which the author linked)

* Audience reach

I don't use Medium for my own writing, I guess my goals towards my writing aren't to reach as many as possible, but for many that is one (if not the most, even if subconsciously) important reason to write/create videos/stream/open source software...

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Hosting a blog and put a couple of ads on it is one thing, it's practically free if you just put your static content on S3.

Hosting videos or streams is a whole other world, you need actual infrastructure and a lot of bandwidth.

you can get 1 TB for 1 usd/month if you look outside aws

Link? I have to admit it has been some time since I compared services, but that sounds like the first TB, a highly unreliable CDN, some stupid low number of simultaneous connections, or some other such lame artificial resource limitation.

If you are in Europe, scaleway.net has a 200Mbit flatrate - for 3$ if you take the cheapest offering.

Where I live you can get dedicated GBit transit for ca $310 /month. If my calculations are right, that would be ca $1 per TB of monthly data transfer. You can probably get it cheaper, but these prices do not leave much margin for the hosting provider, and are basically "self hosting" prices. You should look for unmanaged VPS's and don't expect much support.

As someone with a small, yet significant amount of YouTube subscribers (~83,000 as of now), this is very true. My channel would cost me money if I decided to self publish. My videos average roughly 1-2gb at full viewing quality, excluding outliers,and right now my view count is a number higher than I'd be able to pay for. Even if we assumed I had a server with unlimited SSD and connection capacity, egress would be a problem for me. Instead, YouTube pays a small but significant portion of my earnings to me every month and they handle all of the infrastructure for me, which they do a fantastic job of. I've never had a video become unavailable due to downtime or unintentional social media denial of service, after ~4 years of using the service. Granted, I do get strikes fairly often which does complicate things, and some videos do get demonetized with little to no recourse, but the convenience and reach outweigh that frustration for me.

you could release your videos as torrent files. then earn money via sponsors. you could use a newsletter service and rrs to inform your subscribers when there is new content.

It's like being your own lawyer. It's possible, and in the past it was much simpler — but things are so complex now that it doesn't ultimately seem worth it. As complexity grows so does reliance on specialists.

Mostly true, but there are some emerging tools out there that could mitigate this like IPFS or some JS torrent clients.

If you're using S3, are you really self-hosting? Where is the key philosophical distinction? Can I use a VPS? A co-lo? Or is the only true self-hosting owning physical hardware and being your own ISP with tier 1 peering agreements?

Personally, I just want to make sure my content is hosted at my own expense. I don't want a free service that makes money on top of my content, I want to pay for the services I need to make my content available. So "pay for your own hosting" seems more meaningful than "Self host."

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