For consumers, the equivalent of "build or buy" could be called "ads or nerds". "Ads" meaning ad-supported services, like consumer Gmail or Facebook. "Nerds" meaning hobbyist services based on free software and commodity hardware.

If you already have computer-based hobbies such as gaming or a social-media addiction, why not learn to run your own services as a hobby? Note, this is very different from learning to code. It's more about learning to be your own sysadmin and tech support, rather than being a programmer.

Instead of using a backup service like Google Photos or iCloud, you host your own backup and viewing platform using Nextcloud Photos, PhotoPrism, or such. Instead of using a password management system like LastPass or 1Password, you host your own password manager like BitWarden.

Kamatera is a very good option to run a mail server because They don’t block port 25, so you can send unlimited emails (transactional email and newsletters) without spending money on SMTP relay service. Kamatera doesn’t have any SMTP limits. You can send a million emails per day. The IP address isn’t on any email blacklist. (At least this is true in my case. I chose the Dallas data center.) You definitely don’t want to be listed on the dreaded Microsoft Outlook IP blacklist or the spamrats blacklist. Some blacklists block an entire IP range and you have no way to delist your IP address from this kind of blacklist. You can edit PTR record to improve email deliverability. They allow you to send newsletters to your email subscribers with no hourly limits or daily limits, whatsoever. You can order multiple IP addresses for a single server. This is very useful for folks who need to send a large volume of emails. You can spread email traffic on multiple IP addresses to achieve better email deliverability.

Modoboa is an alternative to those 3 options. It frees you from dependence on email providers and makes accessible to all the creation his own secure email server.

Self-hosting is when you---either using a computer on your local network at home or a remote "bare metal" server host you've purchased---host your own services for various purposes.

In many ways, mail server stacks represent a collision between the tools and values of the early internet — self-hosting open source software using well-defined standards and interoperable protocols — and the reality of the modern internet — a few centralized, trusted authorities.

The term independent is considered more appropriate than self, as in self-hosted, considering the latter can give the wrong impression that it only refers to situations where the owners of a website decided to physically host it on hardware that is physically controlled and managed by them.

Projects like the Open Journal System, Manifold or Scalar are based on a distributed model that allow anyone to download and deploy the software (Maxwell et al., 2019), offering an alternative to the commercial entities that dominate the scholarly communication ecosystem.

Get a small home server (e.g. ASRock Beebox), get a domain and run Cloudron, then enable Nextcloud (and any other app they provide).Provides local and off-site backup (e.g. on S3).

Mozilla does not permit extensions distributed through https://addons.mozilla.org/ to load external scripts. Mozilla does allow extensions to be externally distributed, but https://addons.mozilla.org/ is how most people discover extensions. The are still concerns: Google and Microsoft do not grant permission for others to distribute their "widget" scripts. Google's and Microsoft's "widget" scripts are minified. This prevents Mozilla's reviewers from being able to easily evaluate the code that is being distributed. Mozilla can reject an extension for this. Even if an extension author self-distributes, Mozilla can request the source code for the extension and halt its distribution for the same reason.

Something else that will never change is the right to freely self-host Matomo On-Premise; this way you can always host Matomo Analytics on your own servers without having to pay for it.

How do you leverage browser cache when Google’s very own Analytics.js has it’s expiry time set to 2 hours? How do you minimize DNS requests when Google advices you to copy their tracking code, linking to an externally hosted Javascript file?If that isn’t bad enough already, Google’s advice is to avoid hosting the JavaScript file locally. And why? To ensure you get access to new features and product updates.

Why should I host analytics.js locally?The Complete Analytics Optimization Suite for WordPress gives you the best of both worlds. After activation it automagically downloads the latest version of analytics.js from Google’s servers, places the necessary tracking code in your WordPress theme’s header and keeps the local Javascript file up-to-date using an adjusted version of Matthew Horne’s update analytics script and wp_cron(). This way you can minimize DNS requests, leverage browser cache, track your visitors and still follow Google’s recommendation to use the latest features and product updates.