I thought colo was your hardware in someone else's data center.

For me though a VPS is still self hosting because you own your applications data and have control over it.

You're less beholden to the whims of a company to change the software or cut you off. With appropriate backups you should be able to move to a new cloud provider fairly easily.

I disagree. Selfhosting is not specific to hardware location for me. My own git server is definitely selfhosted, VPN, and so on.

I agree that having your own hardware at home is a more pure way of doing it, but I'd just call that a Homelab. I personally just combine both.

Of course it's self hosting. The term "self hosting" just means being in control of the service or host yourself, as opposed to that being controlled by a third party.

It doesn't mean the hardware has to be in your house. It just so happens that that is the majority preference, because people value privacy, and are often hosting private data.

I'd like to pose the fact that VPSes and Hosted solutions are different as a rebuttle to what you're saying. It's pretty unreasonable to gate keep self hosting behind having the hardware running on a device you control.

Yup, it's more like self administration or something like that