About SelfHostYourself

Who runs this

SelfHostYourself is an independent project. It is not a company, not a media brand, and not run on behalf of any of the products it lists.

We self-host the kind of software we write about, starting with this site: it is deployed on our own server through a self-hosted Coolify instance. That is why the Coolify guide is written in the first person - it documents the deployment this site actually runs on, not a lab setup.

We do not claim to have used every project in the directory. Where we have deployed something ourselves and have something specific to say about it, we write a guide and say so there. Everywhere else the page is what it looks like: a structured description plus verifiable repository data.

How a project gets listed

A project is added when all of these hold:

• •The software is open source and its source is publicly readable.
• •You can run it on your own hardware without paying a licence fee, on the terms of its own licence.
• •It has a public repository we can reach, so the stars, forks, licence and last-commit date on this site come from the project itself and not from us.
• •It solves a problem a commercial product also solves, which is what makes an "alternative to" page meaningful.

Anyone can submit a project. Submissions are reviewed by hand against the rules above before they appear.

What we leave out

• •Source-available products whose licence forbids self-hosting in the way people actually mean it.
• •Projects with no reachable repository, because then every number on the page would be unverifiable.
• •Paid placements. Nobody can buy a listing, a ranking position or a "top pick" badge.

Where the numbers come from

Stars, forks, licence, repository creation date and last commit date are read directly from each project's hosting platform by a scheduled job that runs daily. We store the value and the date we read it; we never estimate a number we could not fetch. When a project has no reachable repository statistics, the page says so instead of showing a zero.

The maintenance verdict on each project page is derived mechanically from the last commit date: active under six months, slowing between six and eighteen months, likely dormant beyond that. It is a signal about commit activity, not a judgement about software quality - some mature tools are simply finished.

How ordering works

Listings are ordered by GitHub stars by default, and you can re-sort by forks, name, last commit or repository age. Stars are a popularity signal, not a quality one, and we present them as such. On an alternatives page the ordering is the same, with a single editorially chosen top pick where one exists.

Not every page on this site is submitted to search engines. Pages that would only repeat what a richer page already says - a project with fewer than 250 stars, an alternatives page with too few options, a tag that duplicates a category - stay reachable for people browsing but are marked as not for indexing. We would rather have fewer pages worth reading than more pages worth skipping.

Corrections

If something here is wrong - a stale link, a licence we got wrong, a project that has moved or been archived - tell us and it gets fixed. Corrections are free and do not require anyone to be polite about it.