Why FOSS Projects Need Ethical Hosting
When you choose hosting for your FOSS project, you’re making more than an infrastructure decision. You’re choosing who profits from your project’s existence, what values your infrastructure embodies, and whether your hosting provider could become your project’s bottleneck.
Infrastructure is Political
Every hosting decision expresses values. When you host on AWS, a portion of your project’s budget funds one of the largest proprietary software vendors in the world — a company that actively competes with open source alternatives to its own services.
When you host on Hetzner, your money supports a company that sponsors FOSS events, contributes to the Linux kernel, and provides rescue system images for nearly every Linux distribution.
The difference isn’t theoretical. It’s structural.
What “Ethical Hosting” Actually Means
Ethical hosting isn’t about purity tests. It’s about alignment:
- No predatory Terms of Service — no clauses that forbid running “competing” services or that give the provider rights to your data
- Open source friendly by default — native support for Linux distributions, ISO mounting, no proprietary agent requirements
- Privacy-respecting — clear data handling policies, no unnecessary data collection
- Fair pricing — no egress fee traps, no surprise billing
- Transparent operations — you know what you’re paying for and why
The Hidden Costs of Unethical Hosting
Proprietary hosting platforms create three categories of hidden cost:
Vendor lock-in. AWS’s ecosystem is designed to be sticky. Once you’re using Lambda, RDS, and SQS, leaving means rewriting your application. This isn’t an accident — it’s the business model.
Egress fees. Storing 1 TB on S3 costs ~$23/month. Downloading that 1 TB costs $90. These asymmetric pricing models make migration expensive and discourage you from leaving.
Terms of Service overreach. Several major cloud providers include clauses allowing them to terminate accounts for “excessive” resource usage (undefined) or for running services that “compete” with their offerings.
Choosing Aligned Infrastructure
Your FOSS project already stands for software freedom. Your infrastructure should too:
- Use FOSS deployment tools — Coolify instead of Heroku, Woodpecker CI instead of proprietary CI platforms
- Choose providers with public FOSS commitments — Hetzner, BuyVM, and Cherry Servers actively support open source
- Self-host where practical — Gitea for code, Plausible for analytics, Vaultwarden for passwords
- Document your infrastructure choices — it helps other FOSS projects make informed decisions
The Bottom Line
You wouldn’t build a FOSS project on proprietary dependencies. Don’t build it on proprietary infrastructure either. The providers exist. The tools exist. The community exists.
Ethical hosting isn’t a compromise — it’s consistency between what you build and how you build it.