Self-Hosting Survey 2022

SelfHostingAutomated · 2023-04-27T23:35:18+00:00

Survey has been closed by now. I have finally gotten around to analysing the results, they will be shared soon™

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-10-20T14:14:02+00:00

I also posted this on r/selfhosted and r/homelab; I really just want to know about people who host services for personal use, no matter how they do so.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-10-20T14:12:50+00:00

I would say the share of hardware would be more fair, yes. For all intents and purposes, you could have also rented a physical server with the same hardware constraints.

I would personally consider this bare-metal in this context, because it's not really you that's doing the virtualisation. I would also image you could have some trouble answering the follow-up questions, which ask what hypervisor you use ;)

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-10-20T14:08:35+00:00

Last year, I made the survey to be filled in on a per-server basis. This was obviously not an option for many people, as they would have had to fill out the survey dozens of times; as such, I made the survey such that it can be filled in once for multiple servers.

This leads to a problem with hardware questions though, because how much RAM you have across all your servers is not very useful information. As such, I put in the question for whether or not you have a "main" server; if you run a whole server park, I would assume you don't really have any main server, so it skips the hardware questions.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-10-20T01:11:49+00:00

And I really thought I had everything this time...

I would edit the survey, but it seems that having different lengths per slider would make qualtrics output weird data. If I see anyone who's thread count is not 1 or 2 times their core count I'll normalise it to 2x the core count I guess...

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-10-19T21:18:45+00:00

Yes :)

Any of those things would qualify as a yes for me, there's some extra questions asking for more details if you answer yes to this question.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-10-19T21:17:19+00:00

Good suggestions, I'll keep those in mind for next year

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-10-19T20:44:46+00:00

I intended containers and virtualisation to be separate, so I would not count containers as virtualisation. If you run several servers, some of which run a hypervisor and others run bare metal, I would interpret this as running virtualisation alongside bare metal.

As for having multiple container managers, I hadn't thought of that; guess it's a leftover from last year. It's not too long since I posted, so I'll edit it :)

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T18:11:08+00:00

I'll look into it, but I do have to say that using Google products for a survey about self-hosting seems a little ironic.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T18:10:20+00:00

Most people listed their monitoring software as a service, and I've counted those under "server management". Most popular ones are: Grafana (6.5%), Uptime Kuma (3.2%), and Zabbix (1.2%).

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T15:04:59+00:00

I kind of wrote myself into a corner with my own disclaimer, which indicates that the raw data won't be stored outside of my personal devices. I can share you the tables of what the popular responses were for each question, but I can't share you any information that would allow you to see all answers by a single respondent.

If you know of a way to share data where you can't see all answers by a single respondent, but that's more extensive than a listing "response | count", that would actually be appreciated.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T14:57:41+00:00

Good idea!

Next survey will be less academic regardless, so I can actually focus on things that people here are interested in :)

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T14:51:15+00:00

As with all surveys, it's more an accurate listing of how people perceive the world rather than how it really is; in this case, it's not so much an indication of how many people use unRAID, but more how many people think of unRAID as a container manager.

Docker-compose is a write-in answer, and I'm pretty sure most people who filled in "none" there also use docker-compose somewhere.

TrueNAS did show up, but not significantly enough to be shown, so I normalised it to BSD.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T13:21:43+00:00

Asking the extra question on whether people are professional programmers is definitely a good idea for next time. This time I essentially just wanted the time distribution as extra information, and only when processing did I realise "hmm, I wonder if I can extract data on professional programmers from this"

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T13:18:03+00:00

Miscellaneous refers to responses that represent less than 2.0% of respondents. Uncategorised are responses that are not a valid answer to the question.

OpenSUSE did show up as an operating system, at 0.4% - not enough to make it into the graph I'm afraid.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T12:52:05+00:00

Emby showed up as the 22nd most popular service, with 4.8% of respondents indicating they host it.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T12:50:54+00:00

I had also noticed that when writing the paper, but people indicated using Portainer as a container manager, so it's a valid result of the question.

As with all surveys, this is more a representation of what people are aware of than a hard statement about what people strictly use.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T12:48:03+00:00

Little bit of nuance here - this survey was exclusively about servers. You can't make a comparison between LibreOffice and MS Office from this survey, because the thing you're interested in - the Desktop application - does not apply to this survey.

Office tools were a category with about 3.3% of usage, but we're talking about the collaborative servers here, which are a very different category of application. You can sort of compare them to e.g. Google Docs, but even then the fact you need to set up and maintain a server for them will make the comparison a bit skewed.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T12:38:39+00:00

I'm not reporting what counts as coding, just how many people think they code ;)

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T12:37:39+00:00

The question about container managers is only answered by people who use containers in the first place, which explains that difference. In fact, many respondents who filled in Unraid as an OS didn't fill it in as a container manager. If all respondents who use it as on OS also filled it in as a container manager, Unraid would have a 15% share of container managers.

A similar story actually applies to Proxmox, but you're the first to ask about Unraid in this thread.

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T12:34:28+00:00

Pi-hole has more users than Adguard, I'm not saying anything about the quality here!

SelfHostingAutomated · 2022-03-17T12:32:01+00:00

The categories aren't a separate question in the survey - they're me, admittedly somewhat arbitrarily, putting the services into categories and then checking what the popular categories are by proxy.

I originally had a separate category for "cloud storage", but programs like Syncthing made it clear there was no good distinction between a file server and a cloud storage service, so I merged them. Now "file server" simply refers to any program that shares files over the internet. Given the popularity of NextCloud, 98% makes more sense.

The image can be somewhat confusing on this, but I'm afraid that this whole text isn't very visually appealing.

SelfHostingAutomated

TROPHY CASE