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Technical

Self-Hosted / On-Premise

Definition

A deployment model where software or an AI model runs on infrastructure the user controls rather than on the vendor's managed cloud.

In-Depth Explanation

Self-hosting means running an application or model on your own servers, private cloud, or on-premises data center instead of consuming it as a vendor-managed service. Organizations choose it for data residency, privacy, regulatory control, or offline (air-gapped) operation, accepting the trade-off of managing the infrastructure themselves. Open-weight models make self-hosting practical because the weights can be downloaded and run locally. It contrasts with closed, API-only SaaS.

Real-World Example

A hospital self-hosts an open-weight LLM on-premises so patient data never leaves its own network.

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Related Terms

Inference

The process of using a trained AI model to make predictions or generate outputs from new input data.

Ollama

An open-source tool that makes it easy to run large language models locally on your computer with a simple command-line interface.

Open Source AI

AI models and tools whose source code and/or weights are freely available for use, modification, and distribution.

Open Weights

AI models whose trained parameters are publicly downloadable, so anyone can self-host and fine-tune them even without the training data or code.