I mean, you could play an infinite regress game. Do you own the hardware? Do you own the cage the hardware is in? Do you own the building that the cage is in, and the land that the building is on? And then we can go toward owning the power company and the connections to anybody your servers talk to.
But in practice, self-hosting is about control. If what you're running it on is a commodity cloud instance that you could get from a half-dozen providers, then any one cloud provider has very little leverage over you.
No. If you have dedicated hardware (rented or owned) and full disk encryption you have decent control over your data. On a virtual server
you have no control and no privacy.
I mean, you could play an infinite regress game. Do you own the hardware? Do you own the cage the hardware is in? Do you own the building that the cage is in, and the land that the building is on? And then we can go toward owning the power company and the connections to anybody your servers talk to.
But in practice, self-hosting is about control. If what you're running it on is a commodity cloud instance that you could get from a half-dozen providers, then any one cloud provider has very little leverage over you.