AI Vocabulary · 06 Own Your AI
What is Self-Hosting?
Running AI models or tools on infrastructure you control, instead of using someone else's service.
Self-hosting means you operate the software yourself: on your own servers, in your own cloud account or in a data centre you choose. For AI that usually means running an open-weight model with an inference server, sometimes together with a self-hosted chat interface or vector database.
It sits between using a provider's service and local AI on a single laptop. You get control over data location, versions and access, and you take on the work: hardware or GPU costs, security, updates, monitoring.
Why it matters for you
Self-hosting is worth considering when data must not leave your infrastructure, when usage is high and predictable enough that fixed costs beat per-token fees, or when you need a model version that never changes.
Own it
You don't have to self-host everything. A practical setup is a provider for most work and a self-hosted model for the sensitive part. Even a small proof of concept shows your team, and your clients, that you are not dependent on one company.
Where it comes from
Self-hosting is a community practice rather than a coined term. It grew as virtual servers and cloud computing made running your own services affordable, and as free and open-source software offered alternatives for files, passwords, media and more. A lively hobbyist community now shares guides and tools; running AI models yourself is its newest chapter. Wikipedia: Self-hosting
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