Self-Hosting
Self-hosting means running a product's software entirely on infrastructure the customer owns and operates — including deployment, updates, and maintenance — rather than relying on the vendor's managed service at all.
Self-hosting is the deployment model with the most customer control and the most customer responsibility. Nothing about the deployment depends on the vendor's infrastructure or ongoing operations — the software, once handed over, runs entirely within an environment the customer manages end to end, including patching, scaling, backups, and security hardening.
That full control is exactly what some organizations need: air-gapped environments, strict sovereignty requirements, or a policy that categorically prohibits data leaving infrastructure the organization directly controls. It comes at a real cost, though — the operational burden of running a production communication platform (uptime, upgrades, incident response) shifts entirely onto the customer's own team, which is a meaningful commitment most organizations don't take on lightly.
Products that are architected to support multiple deployment shapes — SaaS through fully self-hosted — from the same underlying kernel let a customer choose the sovereignty/operational-burden tradeoff that fits them, rather than forcing an all-or-nothing choice between a managed service and a completely separate self-hosted fork that drifts from the mainline product over time.
Self-Hosting, in the product
A sealed self-host deployment is one of aanty's four deployment shapes, running the identical kernel as SaaS rather than a separate fork — for sovereignty buyers and organizations migrating away from other self-hosted tools who still want the full feature set, including AI, agents and the security spine.
Related terms and pages
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