On why companies should self host

Consider the following use cases, and a hypothetical scenario of what would happen normally in an organization which does not solve these explicitly

1. A developer wants to convert sensitive doc from base64 to plain text
   • people go to public websites & paste PII data due to ignorance
2. People want to shorten links and create bookmarks. for example company.links/mis should take you to the data analytics platform
   • everyone creates there own set of bookmarks, and migrations to new domains are essentially messages on public channels etc..
3. Dashboard of all internal services
   • bookmarks again
4. People want to chat using ChatGPT / Claude
   • they user either personal accounts with their own configuration
5. Marketing wants to transcribe a un-released, probably sensitive video and extract text
   • upload to some website which offers a free tier
6. Convert & Join PDFs
   • some random online tools
7. Share files between devices
   • personal whatsapp or telegram would be used

There are many other use cases where employees default to their own preferred method without really thinking about data security

Instead if the company opts to run a small server under a VPN, then for each of these problems, there is a nice solution which is data sec friendly

Here is how it would look like in a world where the company uses something like runTipi to self host inside a VPN

1. A developer wants to convert sensitive doc from base64 to plain text
   • Cyberchef
2. People want to shorten links and create bookmarks. for example company.links/mis should take you to the data analytics platform
   • Shlink
3. Dashboard of all internal services
   • a dashboard like Dashy or Homepage
4. People want to chat using ChatGPT / Claude
   • Open webUI
5. Marketing wants to transcribe a un-released, probably sensitive video and extract text
   • self hosted whisper based transcriber
6. Convert & Join PDFs
   • Sterling PDFs
7. Share files between devices
   • Something along the lines of Send

The organization can have its own universe of self hosted & well designed tooling which solves these problems really well.

More importantly, self hosting is deemed to be too scary. I disagree. Its actually very much doable with the current compute speeds and docker based backups.

Companies should give it a honest shot at a small scale to start with and see how it goes.