When your business relies on third-party platforms for communication, collaboration, and storage, you’re handing someone else the keys. Pricing changes, policy shifts, acquisitions, shutdowns — any of these can disrupt your operations overnight. Self-hosting your critical infrastructure means those decisions stay with you. Your tools keep working the way you need them to, on your terms.
Owning your infrastructure means owning the data that flows through it. Email, chat, file storage, project management — when you run these services yourself, the data never leaves your control. There’s no third party mining it, monetizing it, or deciding how long they’ll keep it around. You get full visibility into where your data lives and who has access, plus the flexibility to customize every tool to fit how your team actually works.
Self-hosting also puts you in charge of your own security posture. You set the standards, apply the hardening, and control the access — no waiting on a vendor’s timeline for patches or hoping their security practices meet yours. There’s real upfront investment in running your own stack, but for organizations that treat data privacy and operational independence as priorities, the long-term payoff in control and peace of mind is well worth it.
Here are some examples of services you can self-host to replace your reliance on third parties:
(Source)
| 3rd Party Service | Self-hosted Alternatives |
|---|---|
| Gmail | Postfix + Dovecot + RoundCube, etc. |
| Google Calendar | Radicale, NextCloud, OwnCloud, etc. |
| Google Docs | Collabora Office, NextCloud, OwnCloud, etc. |
| Slack / Teams | Mattermost |
| GitHub | SourceHut (we run it at code.netlandish.com), Gitea, GitLab, etc. |
| Bitly, Linktr.ee, Pinboard | links (LinkTaco) |
| Twitter (micro blogging) | Mastodon (we run social.netlandish.com) |
| Dropbox / Google Drive | SyncThing, OwnCloud, NextCloud, Pydio |
| Jira | Redmine, Trac, Bugzilla |
| Confluence | BlueSpice, xWiki, DocuWiki |
| Notion | AppFlowy |
We run our own, and we run it for clients.
Netlandish itself
We practice what we recommend. Our code lives on our own SourceHut instance at code.netlandish.com, our mailing lists at lists.code.netlandish.com, and our social presence on our own Mastodon server at social.netlandish.com. Our links and bookmarks run on LinkTaco, which we built and open sourced.
IDS Real Estate Group
Since 2014 we've built the custom integrations and managed the servers behind IDS Real Estate Group's platforms.
Whether you're exploring AI for the first time or ready to scale, we'd love to talk.
Ready to bring AI into your business?
Send us an email at hello@netlandish.com, call us at +1 562-318-0100, or hit the button below to fill out our contact form. We'll get back to you right away.