Beyond Cloud Lock-in Assessing a Tiered Framework for a Sustainable Self-Hosted Infrastructure

The current landscape of digital infrastructure for the consumer sector is characterized by a growing dependence on centralized cloud platforms, raising substantive concerns around data sovereignty, ethical data management, and long-term economic sustainability. This thesis investigates self-hosting — the deployment of personal digital services on privately owned hardware — as a technically mature and economically viable alternative to commercial cloud for both individual users and small organizations. The analysis is organized around four dimensions: functional parity of open-source software, economic sustainability through total cost of ownership evaluation, environmental impact, and distributed computing feasibility. To guide practitioners in navigating the self-hosting ecosystem, a three-tier classification framework is introduced, mapping available solutions along a spectrum from accessibility to technical autonomy. Particular attention is devoted to the role of hardware repurposing and node federation as tools for extending the useful life of legacy devices, optimizing idle computational capacity, and reducing both economic and environmental overhead, without sacrificing reliability or operational independence. This thesis aspires to identify the conditions under which self-hosting transcends ideological motivation to become the most efficient, sustainable, and sovereign choice for the end user.