Towards Privacy and Security in Private Clouds: A Representative Survey on the Prevalence of Private Hosting and Administrator Characteristics

Instead of relying on Software-as-a-Service solutions, some people self-host services from within their homes. In doing so they enhance their privacy but also assume responsibility for the security of their operations. However, little is currently known about how widespread private self-hosting is, which use cases are prominent, and what characteristics set self-hosters apart from the general population. In this work, we present two large-scale surveys: (1) We estimate the prevalence of private self-hosting in the U.S. across five use cases (communication, file storage, synchronized password managing, websites, and smart home) based on a representative survey on Prolific (n = 1505). (2) We run a follow-up survey on Prolific (n = 589) to contrast individual characteristics of identified self-hosters to people of the same demographics who do not show the behavior.

We estimate an upper bound of 8.4% private self-hosters in the U.S. population. Websites are the most common use case for self-hosting, predominately running on home servers. All other use cases were equally frequent. Although past research identified privacy as a leading motivation for private self-hosting, we find that self-hosters are not more privacy-sensitive than the general population. Instead, we find that IT administration skills, IT background, affinity for technology interaction, and "maker" self-identity positively correlate with self-hosting behavior.