Self Hosted

Self-Hosted = BYOB

“Bring Your Own Box”

Backup Brain is an app that you “host” on your own computer. This could be an old laptop you stick in a closet, or a Raspberry Pi, a virtual machine hosted by Digital Ocean, or anything else.

There is no site where you can just sign up for an account.

For more details on self-hosting and its history, check out Wikipedia’s article on Self-Hosting.

Upsides

• Free without advertising to you or selling your data.
• No fees for using more storage, bandwidth, or anything else.
• No risk of loosing your bookmarks & archives because it “wasn’t profitable enough”, or because someone stopped paying the bills.
• Totally private. I don’t have your data. I don’t want your data. I don’t even know you’ve installed it, unless you tell me.
• Fast. 🏎💨 You’re not sharing a server with thousands or millions of other users. It’s just you.
• Hackable Don’t like the way something looks, or works? You can change it.

Downsides

• Version 1’s installation requires geekery.
• If you run it on a local network you need to take extra steps to expose it to the wider internet. Something you’ll need if you want to see your bookmarks when away from home.
• The combination of Database, Search Engine, and Server will use a chunk of your RAM. Probably not as much as those 20 tabs you have open in your browser, but it’s not nothing.